I look at empty movie theatres in India and realise we’re losing more than just a night out

I arrive early, always. The third row of the rear, where the velvet seats still draw whispers of a hundred past films. The theater smells weakly in dust and popcorn, and the lights have not yet lowered, but I am already wrapped in its cocoon. I pretend to scroll through my phone, although there is no one to send a message. No late friends arriving with popcorn. No familiar voice whispering next to me. Just me and the flicker of a world, I am about to enter alone.

It did not start as a preference. Watching the movies alone was simply a by-product of work. As a journalist covering the cinema, I would often be at 8 a.m., launchy eyes and sub-legers, trying to give meaning to the films before the rest of the world finished breakfast. The first time was like a drawback. By the tenth, a habit. By the twentieth, something close to devotion.

The theater, with its effiloche carpet and flicker exit panels, has become a space where no one asked questions. Not why I was alone. Not if I needed a company. Here, loneliness was not something to explain – it was allowed.

Subha Jayanagaraja, an entertainment journalist from mangalore, said to me: “I liked to watch films by myself because of the pure force of circumstances. I will and end up buying four or five tickets, whatever the minimum naked necessary to ensure that the film is screened. ” According to her, it is worth the therapeutic experience she offers her.

I understand exactly what she means. There is something private intention to look at a story to take place in the dark, the characters who flourish in front of you in a silence that you do not have to share. It is a form of therapy without dialogue. Just a transaction between you and the screen.

Meghna Singhal, a therapist, calls her immersion. “You are mainly not distracted by your phone, you cannot take the film in pause, you cannot answer your task list or everything that needs your attention. It’s just you and the story that takes place on the screen.”

And then there are the moments when the story is more than taking place. He pulls. The anonymity of darkness allows you to feel without playing. I cried in the last twenty minutes of Superboys de Malegaon (2024). Not a delicate cinematographic tear; The real genre and shaking the shoulders. No one has noticed. Or if they did it, they didn’t care. There is grace to be ignored.