The dark of the matinee provides a safe space for emotional outpouring.
There’s something oddly comforting to me about sitting in the cinema with people audibly sniffling nearby. It makes me feel less alone in my own susceptibility to crying at the cinema, particularly before noon. An example: one Saturday morning, I’m sitting in a screening of the queer romantic drama The History of Sound. At its centre, folk music hums, engulfing me in the malaise of longing and heartbreak. I’m right there with Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. It is, to say the least, a tearjerker – an unfortunate genre label that feels almost reductive for what is happening in the room.
It struck me that I cried in almost every screening I attended during last year’s London Film Festival. To be fair, that’s not unusual for me; I cry in most films, from comedies and dramas to thrillers and romance, there’s always at least one scene that gets me. What felt new this time was how explicitly some of these films seemed to encourage that reaction. Grief, emotional excess and tenderness were not side effects; they were the point. These were films asking not to be casually admired, but to be endured, absorbed, and shared.
As streaming platforms take the reins of formulaic comfort viewing, and franchise action films bring CGI spectacle, emotionally driven mid-budget and independent films fill a different kind of cinematic hunger. Don’t get me wrong, films that elicit tears have always existed, but what feels pertinent is the recent cluster of similar tonal films in recent years. Films such as this year’s Oscars-contenders Hamnet and Sentimental Value are being sought out precisely because they promise catharsis – emotional blockbusters, as I like to call them. And frankly, I’m here for it.
The act of weeping in storytelling is nothing new, though its cultural value has ebbed and flowed. Aristotle, writing in 'Poetics' in the 4th century BC, defined katharsis as the collective purging of feeling and pity, experienced by the viewer of tragedy. By the late 18th century, Western norms had shifted away from emotional restraint towards an artistic culture of sensibility, where dissolving into tears, particularly for men, was encouraged. Romanticism emerged in the 19th century in response to the rediscovery of the Enlightenment era - bringing nature and the interior world of feeling back into poetry, literature, theatre and art. The 20th century saw the development of cinematic film and the melodrama genre, as well as the Freudian notion that catharsis can be the release of traumatic repression or psychological distress.
So where does that leave us now? I asked several friends whether they would be deterred from seeing a film openly advertised as sad – the answer was a resounding no. One told me that watching emotional films and crying in cinemas actually taught them how to cry in public. Another said, “Crying is not my default emotion in real life; I rarely cry, so I go to the cinema to deliberately feel an emotional extreme.” Just as people pay to be thrilled, scared or anxious, people willingly go to screenings to sob. Why should it be any different?
Crying is a form of positive emotional processing, particularly when it occurs with others and in a safe environment (which for some can be the cinema). Even films themselves frame characters’ emotional release through spectatorship to drive a narrative. In Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, there is a scene in which Nana (played by Anna Karina) sits in a dark theatre, watching Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, tears running down her face as she recognises her own experience of mistreatment by men and questions her mortality.
In a culture increasingly desensitised by constant exposure to, well, everything, perhaps crying at the cinema is not emotional excess, but proof that the numbness has been punctured. The very experience of going to the cinema asks us to stop scrolling, stop moving on, and to feel something fully and be affected, even if only for two hours.
In recent years, there’s been a plethora of independent successes that have hinged on emotional intensity, including Call Me By Your Name, All of Us Strangers, Past Lives, Close and The Voice of Hind Rajab. Distributors are clearly picking up on this. To promote Sentimental Value, MUBI included a box of tissues in its press materials, as if daring viewers not to feel something.
Arguably, this past year’s most divisively emotive film is Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, which reimagines William Shakespeare’s inner life through the early death of his only son. Anchored by Jessie Buckley’s devastating performance as Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, the film lingers on the profundity of grief in all its complexity. Hamnet is undeniably positioned as a film designed for immersive, communal viewing, and it shows in the statistics, making a healthy box-office return on its production budget in addition to many film accolades.
Zhao has been candid about why grief sits at the centre of her work and how vulnerability through art has allowed her to process her own emotions. “All my characters grieve who they thought they were in order to become who they truly are,” she explains to the Los Angeles Times. “That's grief on an individual and collective level. I wasn't raised to understand grief. So, I made films to give characters catharsis and through that, myself."
Of course, not everyone is convinced. Films like Hamnet have been accused of manufacturing emotional heft, veering into grief porn rather than grief art. During the 2023 awards season, one critic argued that sustained emotional sequences ask audiences to project their own experiences without offering much narrative substance or nuanced character development in return, while another points to the overuse of Max Richter’s score On the Nature of Daylight, as a musical trope to manipulate a viewer into a state of sadness in the climactic ending scene. These are valid critiques – a tactical attempt to provoke such an emotional reaction, particularly when so obvious and hollow, can be distasteful. Yet this dismisses the subjective nature of an emotional response – what feels manipulative to one viewer might feel like recognition to another.
For me, the communal dimension is the most fascinating part of wail-worthy films. Crying synchronises a room, creating a wordless, collective experience between strangers sitting shoulder to shoulder in the dark. In the final scene of Hamnet, Agnes realises the play unfolding before her is not just theatre, but a conduit for Shakespeare’s grief over their son. As she reaches out towards the boy on stage, the surrounding theatre audience mirrors her gesture. Grief becomes catharsis, rippling outward, from mother to performer to crowd. And in the cinema where we sit, something similar happens; we echo it, too. There is a connection on-screen as much as there is off-screen, a shared acknowledgement that insists we stay present with the pain.
Moments of connectivity like this feel increasingly rare in our digital age. We are accustomed to reacting alone, on a small screen, privately. To be so naked with our emotions in a communal setting alongside strangers, in real time, is an opportunity to reckon with our own feelings through external stories. The bottom line is, if you’re going to feel something, don’t feel it alone.
Horror has long been marketed as a genre best experienced collectively, which perhaps explains why it remains one of the most profitable genres according to the American Film Market. So could emotive cinema take over in much the same way? A form of participation and reclamation of the cinema as a space for vulnerability, discussion and most importantly, connection.
A critic for The Guardian described a Hamnet festival screening as “a lovely experience, to sob in a movie theatre alongside strangers, mourning for Agnes and William’s loss and for our own, amazed and relieved that a faraway, unknowable person has made something to connect us all.” Meanwhile, in an interview with Little White Lies, Joachim Trier spoke about the power of collective silence in reference to a screening of Sentimental Value, describing the satisfaction of “2,000 people completely breathing together, silent with the sisters [in the scene] and feeling for a moment, that the empathy machine of cinema was creating space”.
I understand that feeling. I have walked into cinemas feeling closed off and walked out cracked open. A few years ago, Trier’s The Worst Person in the World caught my friend and me on a bad, frustrating day, but upon leaving the screening, we both unequivocally felt unexpectedly lighter, emotionally spent and – dare I say it – cathartically moved for the better.
That Saturday morning after The History of Sound screening, I stepped out having shed a few quiet tears and felt gentler with myself. We shouldn’t go to the cinema to be mildly moved. We should go to feel something fully – and sometimes, that means going to cry.
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