Empire of Light Review: A Muddled Ode to the Magic of the Movies

The title of Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light refers not only to the movie theater, the Empire, at which most of the film is set, but to cinema itself—the “beam of light” that projectionist Norman (Toby Jones) characterizes as “an escape.” But if this film is what Mendes, who also wrote the screenplay, considers a “love letter to cinema,” then this is a rather strange, if visually lush, tribute to the medium. Turns out, the power of movies is at best tangential to the real story: the tempestuous relationship that develops between Hilary (Olivia Colman), the Empire’s manager, and her new employee, the much younger Stephen (Micheal Ward).

Though Empire of Light is set in the U.K. in the early 1980s, Hilary and Stephen’s relationship self-consciously touches upon a handful of issues that have become especially relevant in recent years, namely mental illness, racism, and even toxic masculinity. It’s clear in the film’s early stages that there’s something not quite right with Hilary, with her perpetually numbed manner that not even the chipper smile that she puts on for customers at the Empire can quite hide. A handful of scenes in which she gives updates about her condition to a psychiatrist suggest a previous episode of some sort from which she has been slowly recovering with the help of a lithium prescription. In addition, she endures sexual harassment at the hands of the theater owner, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), who beckons her into his office on occasion for quickies.

A reanimating force appears in the form of Stephen. Played by Ward with a memorable exuberance, especially in his scenes with Colman, Stephen exudes the bloom of youth and possibility, to which Hilary responds in kind, especially once they start covertly carrying on an affair. In Stephen’s case, though, youthfulness doesn’t equal innocence. As a young Black man, he’s had to deal with the racism that flourished under Margaret Thatcher—discrimination that not only leads him to being regularly harassed by white supremacists, but has also put in jeopardy the possibility of getting a secondary education in his desired field of architecture.

Apparently, Hilary has been living in a bubble, since she professes full ignorance of the plight of minorities like Stephen. But, then, as we eventually discover, Hilary has had to deal with her own personal demons in the form of the schizophrenia that led her to be committed for a bit before the events of Empire of Light. Hilary’s declamations on the edge of relapse about the awfulness of men suggest unspeakable traumas that Mendes, mercifully, leaves merely implied. Otherwise, Mendes’s script is more memorable for its Afterschool Special-like heavy-handedness, especially when a violent mob of white supremacists eventually makes their way into the supposed sanctuary of the Empire in the film’s last third.

At this point, one may be wondering what any of this has to do with the magic of the movies. Even though she works at a movie theater, Hilary professes to have not seen a single movie at the Empire, and doesn’t evince any interest in cinema outside of her job (she shows more of an interest in poetry, some of which she shares with Stephen). Only toward the end of Empire of Light does she finally decide to give watching a movie a try. But because Mendes hasn’t sketched in much of a convincing motivation as to why she was resistant to cinema in the first place, what should be a moment of transcendence for her instead lands with a thud.

It’s odd, too, that her tear-stained road-to-Damascus moment comes with a big-screen viewing of Hal Ashby’s Being There: a satire of a simple-minded man basically raised by television who is forced to venture into the outside world, where he is taken for a genius. Is Hilary meant to be a kind of reverse Chauncey Gardiner: a woman so tormented by the outside world that she eventually finds herself entering the world of cinema for refuge? For all the thought that Mendes appears to have put into what cinema truly means to him or his characters, this moment that supposedly illustrates the power of movies, however beautifully lensed by Roger Deakins and scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on the soundtrack, comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the film’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.