Review of The Second Chance Cinema by Thea Weiss

Memory has always fascinated me. I consider myself someone of below-average recall: my memories feel hazy, disordered, disappointing. The chance to revisit some of my memories with perfect fidelity on a big screen? Wow. The Second Chance Cinema is that rare novel with a perfect premise for me. Thea Weiss sets it up so neatly: a couple, engaged, stumbling on a mysterious movie theatre. Alas, the secrets they’ve kept are more banal than bombastic, and the story that results fails to live up to the promise of the premise. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Atria Books in exchange for a review.

Ellie and Drake are your typical, perhaps cookie-cutter couple (more on that in a moment). She writes articles about forgotten little places that need love; he manages construction projects. She has some trauma in her past she would rather not discuss; he has a secret too. Their wedding approaches when, one night, they find an old movie theatre that wasn’t there before, and it has a single midnight showing of “The Story of You.” Hoax? Hallucination? No, the reel is real: it’s playing back vignettes from their lives. They have ten tickets, ten showings. At first, they are hooked—but don’t want to discuss what they see. Then they realize that the memories the movie shows aren’t just the good times but also the bad, and neither wants to share those wounds with the other.

Look, I’m just going to tear the Band-Aid off right now: this book is boring.

As far as couples go, Ellie and Drake feel like a generic stand-in for … like … any upper-middle class couple in the United States. Weiss does her best to salt-and-pepper them with just enough to make them stand out as distinct characters. At the end of the day, however, neither of them feels like a real or interesting person. They feel like the characters you meet in a Hallmark rom-com, years after the meet-cute: they have exactly the substance needed for their story and not a single iota more. I couldn’t pick them out of a line-up if together they had mugged me.

Then there’s that other dimension: them being together. Their relationship is boring. First, they’re both super immature (which, to be fair to Weiss, is I think deliberate). They don’t want to talk to one another. This is, of course, the bread and butter of all stories involving relationship conflict, yet it felt particularly contrived and agonizing here.

They. Shouldn’t. Get. Married.

And I would like to be harsher on Drake because, you know, patriarchy. I’d love for it to be all his fault and to yell at Ellie, “Girl, run! Get out! Choose the bear!” Honestly, though, I think she’s also the problem. She chose not to deal.

But hey, maybe I am being too harsh. Maybe this cranky, cynical aromantic gal just hates romance and missed the point. That’s possible. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that the eponymous plot device is also boring.

First, I don’t think it lives up to its name. “Second chance”? In what way? The viewing is passive; they aren’t altering the past. Sure, there’s the lost and found, and there’s Drake’s whole … secret. I don’t know. It doesn’t quite fit.

Second, there is zero tension related to this theatre. I for sure thought there would be something connected to their limited number of tickets, some hiccup or plot point that would enhance the inevitable moment of tension when Ellie and Drake decide whether or not to make up. I was wrong. The Second Chance Cinema is entirely superfluous to the story that’s named after it. You could excise it from this story, have Ellie and Drake discover each other’s secrets some other, more mundane way, and you would have the same plot. What are you doing??

The stakes just aren’t high enough. Their secrets aren’t dramatic enough. Their missteps aren’t mature enough. Ellie and Drake, separately or together, are not interesting enough. The Second Chance Cinema squanders its first chance. So it goes.