Film Review - Empire of Light (2023)

Empire of Light is the new film by Sam Mendes coming off of his Oscar nominated 1917 in 2019 and stars Olivia Colman and Hilary a Duty Manager at the Empire Cinema in a British Coastal town and one day a young man named Stephen (Micheal Ward) comes to work at the cinema and as she gets to know him she begins to feel more alive than she has in a long time.

I was keen for Empire of Light mainly due to Sam Mendes making it as I loved 1917 a whole lot, it was a stunning war film that floored me when I saw it and again when I rewatched it recently.

But sadly this movie is a real mess that for the most part left me bored and uninterested but I will say this Mendes’s direction and Roger Deakins as cinematographer craft a great looking film that makes full use of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio and Mendes does some great staging and camera blocking in a number of scenes that visually tell the story very well.

But his script is a real mess and it sinks this film as while I was watching it I felt like I was watching 3 separate movie ideas mashed into one:

- One movie about the Empire Cinema and its staff and the day to day going’s on inside the cinema from how it runs to the movies showing to the various customers coming and going through her doors

- A second movie about Hilary and her own private struggles with mental illness

- And a third movie about Stephen and the racism he faces going about his life in Thatcher’s emerging Britain

And only the first of those I found to be of any interest and those scenes when they were allowed to be the main focus really worked for me especially after the dark times of Covid in 2020 and 2021 which saw cinemas close due to the health risks and those were dark days for me as I love the holy church of the cinema and sitting there in that dark space where nothing else matters and I would’ve happily sat through that film from start to finish.

As for the other 2 I didn’t care and I wasn’t interested, Olivia Colman is a gifted actress and there’s very little she can’t do but watching her going through those mental illness moments just felt like a waste of a great talent same with Colin Firth as the theatre manager who also feels wasted in a pretty nothing role.

As for Micheal Ward he is a good young actor but again his storyline didn’t really interest me all that much as it felt like for me “I’ve seen all this and I’m not interested” now this is not in any way to dismiss the very real struggles people of colour have in their daily lives but in this movie they felt like they got in the way of the Empire cinema movie I was so much more interested in.

And so that was Empire of Light which could’ve been something very special maybe this generation’s Cinema Paradiso but instead it’s a boring mess that for the most part left me unmoved, 1 out of 5.