A writer has described how a weekly trip to the cinema helped her begin to recover after her younger brother drowned in an accident in 2022.
Georgina Elliott, writing in the Guardian’s “The one change that worked” series, said her brother’s death upended the life she had been on the verge of starting. She had been offered her first proper job and turned it down; she had been planning to move out of the family home and instead stayed put. At the point when she was ready to step into adult life, she said, everything fell apart.
Three people were left in the house, she wrote, each circling a separate corner of it and each reaching for a different source of comfort — exercise for her mother, music for her father and escape for herself.
That January she described as long and grey, with her thoughts reduced to sludge and grief acting like an airbag against the full impact of what had happened. Light and sound became almost unbearable, she said, as though a layer of skin had been stripped away. Mostly, she felt nothing at all.
In her early 20s and unable to remain in the house indefinitely, she said returning to what she called the hamster wheel seemed pointless. Leaving the building, however, was manageable, and a sign at her local cinema advertising an under-25s membership — weekday tickets at £5.99 — gave her somewhere to go. She pulled on her father’s coat, filled a flask with tea and walked down the hill to Greenwich in blustery weather.
At a screening of Corsage, a feminist account of Sisi, the 19th-century Austrian empress, at 40, with Vicky Krieps in the title role, she sat with four or five other people. Following the character’s ups and downs, she wrote, brought dormant emotions to the surface, and the empress’s self-possession gave her courage. When the lights came up, she said it felt as though a valve had opened and pressure had escaped.
She began going once a week. Sitting in silence alongside others, free to let her face crumple in the dark without fear of how it would be read, gave her a sense of unspoken solidarity, she wrote, citing a claim she had read that strangers’ hearts can begin beating in time in a cinema. She described it as a better balm for grief than the more overt sympathy she had received, comparing it to loosening the muscles around an injury rather than pressing on the sore spot.
Films dealing directly with loss, such as One Fine Morning, about a daughter facing her father’s degenerative illness, proved too difficult, she wrote, so she chose life-affirming titles instead: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Taste of Things and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
A screening of How to Blow Up a Pipeline prompted her to think about eco-anarchism for the first time since school and sharpened her thinking enough for story ideas to surface, she said. Aubrey Gordon’s documentary Your Fat Friend then gave her the idea for her first piece of journalism, on atypical anorexia.
By the time January gave way to February and March, she wrote, she had turned a corner, reminded by the funny, sad and silly films she saw of a world beyond her own bubble, and she decided to rejoin it. On difficult days now, she said, she still buys a ticket, sits in the dark, lets her shoulders drop, breathes and reboots.
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