The Etiquette of the Dark

The cinema is a collective dream. Here is how not to wake anyone up.

You buy a ticket, you enter the dark, and you implicitly agree to something: that for the next two hours, the room belongs to everyone in it equally. Nobody printed that in the programme, but every devoted filmgoer feels it the moment someone breaks it — the sudden blue glow of a phone, the crinkle that won't stop, the whispered commentary that wasn't asked for.

The rules are few and they are not fussy. Arrive on time, or as close to it as you can manage. If trailers have begun, find your seat without theatrical sighing and, where possible, take an end seat rather than climbing the full row. Sit down, settle quickly, and trust that the best position for the next two hours is the one you are already in.

Phones off means off — not silenced, off. Silenced phones still produce screens, and a screen in a darkened room is an interruption in the same register as a torch. The person behind you can see it. So can their neighbour. So can the person two rows back who came to see the film, not your notifications.

Food is fine; cinema and snacks have always been companions. The question is which snacks, and how. Ice, loud packaging, anything with a wrapper designed by someone who has never attended a screening — these are known hazards. A quiet bag of something, opened before the film begins, causes no offence to anyone.

Talking is the sharpest point. The pre-show is communal, sociable, genuinely yours. Once the film begins, commentary stops — including the kind of running commentary well-meaning people offer to first-time viewers. The film will explain itself. It was designed to.

Laughter and gasps and the odd intake of breath are not only permitted, they are part of what makes the communal screening irreplaceable: a room feeling something together. What the revival house teaches, and what any full cinema on a good night confirms, is that the audience is itself a medium — it shapes what the film becomes for every person in it.

Hold that lightly, and the rest follows naturally.