Set in the early 1980s in Margate, a small town on the south coast of England, ‘Empire Of Light‘ focuses on the staff running The Empire, an Art Deco cinema that still has some grandeur but is starting to fall into decay.

I didn’t get to see it at the cinema when it was released last year but the trailer made an impression on me and this weekend I watched it on DVD.

It was wonderful. Everything about it worked. The lighting and the cinematography were gorgeous. I loved every image. It managed to show both the beauty of the coastal light and the Art Deco cinema and the ugliness of the huge tower block that had been built beside it.

The movie was gorgeous to look at but it also looked deeply at how things were. The 1980s details were perfect without wallowing in nostalgia. This is a period I remember well and the movies, the music, the dreary modern architecture and the now strange-to-behold fashions took me right back to how things used to be. So did the racism and the skinhead violence and the casual misogyny and sexual exploitation.

There is a lot of hope in this movie. The Empire Cinema is shown as a beautiful place that offers everyone the chance to escape into the moving image. Toby Jones, the projectionist, provides the words that explain both the science and the magic of a single beam of light that hits the cinema screen and takes the audience out of themselves.

There is also a lot of hurt and hate and pain in the movie. Olivia Coleman, the Deputy Manager of The Empire, suffers from mood swings and is trying to cope by taking Lithium, which leaves her feeling numb. Colin Firth, her older, married, boss, demands joyless sexual services from her which she feels pressured to perform. Mark Ward, a newly recruited Cinema Usher, is the son of a nurse who came over to England from the Caribbean as part of the Windrush generation. He’s taken the job after failing to get into university and he is very aware of the growing racial violence in England.

The performances, particularly from Coleman and Ward, are superb: nuanced, powerful and truthful. I became completely engrossed in watching Coleman and Ward slowly build a relationship that was a complicated mix of joy and hope and hurt.

I found ‘Empire Of Light‘ to be a mostly hopeful movie. One that acknowledged how hostile and unfair the world can be but understood that the only options are to give in or to create what happiness you can with friends and colleagues and the people who love you.

This is a movie that will stay with me for some time and which I’m sure I’ll watch again.

Take a look at the trailer below and see if it appeals to you.