I was worried I wouldn’t cry when I went to see Hamnet. I’d read the book by Maggie O’Farrell, so I knew going in that the story – a mix of fact and fiction – is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, literally. However, I’d heard such tales of sobbing in cinemas and no dry eyes to be found that I was concerned I wouldn’t get emotionally het up enough to add to the sea of tears.
I needn’t have worried. By the third act of the film I was ready to spill, and those final 15 minutes took me over the edge. After the screen faded to black the entire, packed theatre just sat there, processing the grief they’d just witnessed. I walked up the stairs and out of Smithfield’s Lighthouse in a daze, grateful to be alone. I love going to the movies with friends, but I equally relish in going by myself, because it allows me to fully partake in that remarkable feeling of leaving the cinema like a completely new person.
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Come on. You know the feeling I mean. You walk out of a film that’s moved you in some way and you just feel different. Whatever has clung to you during those two or three hours in the dark has a hold on you. The build-up of energy from what you’ve just experienced carries you back out on to the street and for a short while you feel like the only person in the world. For me, there’s often a sense that something imperceptible has changed. Depending on the film, I might leave feeling ready for anything. This sensation might only last an hour or a day, but it’s one of the best, most intangible things to experience as a human. Euphoria is the wrong word, because the feeling is not necessarily always very positive. Maybe we’ll call it “exhilaration”, exhilaration having the potential to be joyful, but also fraught.
My post-Hamnet “exhilaration” was short-lived. And that’s okay – it doesn’t always last very long. Some films, though, leave me in an altered state for days, with the memories lasting for years. I remember seeing Greta Gerwig’s Little Women with friends and adoring it, and then on the way home being struck by an extreme emptiness, a sense of loss that I couldn’t spend any more time with the characters or maybe even that I couldn’t be the characters. Gerwig’s Lady Bird also had a profound effect but this time a more renewed sense of “I can do anything”.
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Coming-of-age films will often do that to you. I saw Lost in Translation in some enormous screen in Dublin city centre 23 years ago and we could only get seats in the second row. I remember feeling like I was inside those scenes in the Tokyo arcade with the bright lights and intense sounds, and the Lost in Translation exhilaration stays with me to this day. Arrival, Aftersun, The Worst Person in the World, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Good Will Hunting, Melancholia – these are all also on my list of “I left the cinema and felt like I would cry or punch a wall or kiss a stranger or maybe all three” films.
The cinema is one of the last places where we fully engage and are present with an art form – if the screening hasn’t been invaded by doses who can’t leave their phones alone. Everywhere else there are people capturing content, turning every single thing into a modern-day Kodak moment. In the cinema, in the dark, something can happen that makes you feel upon emerging that you’ve developed an entirely new personality in two hours.
Going to the cinema alone is when this phenomenon hits the hardest for me. There’s something about going to a film on my own that makes me feel most like myself. Even if the movie doesn’t hold much artistic merit, it’s a real rush. One of the first films I went to see on an early weekday afternoon after I left full-time office employment to pursue writing was The Meg, a big-budget action number featuring Jason Statham versus a giant prehistoric shark. Yes, it was rubbish, but I skipped out of there so exhilarated I felt like I could take on the Meg, and win.
I implore everyone to go to the cinema, alone, on a weekday morning or afternoon at least a few times a year. Make up a dentist appointment, take a half day, give yourself permission. Even if it’s just another Meg sequel, you won’t regret it.
