.” It’s a cinema palace in a small town on England’s south coast that is showing its age. The once-grand establishment used to play films on multiple screens on multiple floors. The top floor even had a large ballroom area, a piano, a stately bar, and booth-style seating next to large windows looking out onto the sea. Going to the movies here, you imagine, must have been an occasion worth dressing up for. But now it’s just gathering dust and providing shelter to the local pigeons.
Colman’s character, Hilary, doesn’t even watch the movies herself. Those, she explains with all the passion of a customer service representative working an overnight shift, are for the patrons. It’s unclear if she’s always been this way, or if it’s the lithium the doctor has prescribed her to take to regulate her moods, but her life is going through the motions, whether it’s setting up the sweets stand or going into the back room with her lecherous, married boss .
But this isn’t “The Fabelmans” or “Armageddon Time.” Mendes has not made his teenage self the protagonist, but instead a woman in middle age who is suffering from mental health issues, and a magnetic younger Black man, Stephen , who far too smart and vibrant for this provincial town. Hilary and Stephen become friends, then lovers, but, you know, it’s complicated and the film is a bit meandering in getting where it’s going.