Two Hours in Another World

How older films take us into another place, another time, and sometimes another version of ourselves

I don’t watch many movies these days.

With two small kids, once a week is already pretty good. Sometimes I start one on Friday evening and realise after an hour that I’m too tired, so I finish it on Saturday. Not exactly the full cinema experience, but that is how it works now.

Because I don’t watch much, I’m also strangely careful about what I choose. I rarely feel like watching the latest blockbuster. Usually I end up with a thriller from the 1990s or early 2000s, or some older film that everyone else apparently saw years ago.

Of course, I want a good story. I like the tension and the feeling that I need to know what happens. But often the plot isn’t what stays with me. It’s more the mood of the place.

A city at night. A quiet hotel lobby. Someone driving through Los Angeles with no traffic. Offices full of old computers. People meeting without sending twelve messages about where exactly they are standing. Even the colours feel different.

I know these films don’t show the real world exactly as it was. They show a director’s version of it. Still, after two hours, I feel as if I have briefly spent time there.

A few days later I might forget a character’s name or how exactly the mystery was solved. But I still remember the apartment, the rain outside the restaurant, or the strange blue light in an office late at night.

There is another thing happening when I watch older films now.

They remind me of when I first started watching movies seriously. VHS tapes, video shops, choosing something mostly from the cover. Sometimes the film was terrible, but you watched it anyway because that was the film you had rented.

There was no checking five reviews before starting. Watching with subtitles in my mother language. No reading the ending because you became slightly bored after forty minutes. Watching the movie was the evening.

Maybe this is why even an old film I have never seen before can feel familiar.

It brings back not only the world of the film, but also the feeling of being younger. First in the 1990s, and later in my twenties, when life still seemed to have an almost ridiculous number of possible directions.

I imagined technology becoming more creative, strange and open. The internet felt like something we were still discovering. You could build things, find people with obscure interests, maybe work from anywhere, maybe move somewhere completely different.

I certainly didn’t imagine the great technological future would involve all of us looking down at small rectangles, moving our thumbs through an endless supply of short videos and arguments.

In my twenties, many futures still seemed realistic. I could move to another country, change careers, start something, meet someone, end up living a life I hadn’t thought of yet.

Now life is more settled. I have a family, routines, responsibilities and a much clearer idea of where I belong. I don’t see that as something sad. Much of it is what I wanted.

Still, there is something nice about briefly remembering the time before most decisions had been made. Older films somehow hold all of this together. The place on screen. The world before smartphones. Evenings with VHS tapes, or even just watching movie on TV with ad breaks with just enough time to grab a snack or go for toilet break. And a younger version of me who had no idea where everything was going.

Then the film ends.

Usually it’s late, there are toys somewhere on the floor, and I know one of the kids might wake up during the night.

I’m back in my actual life, which is a good life.

But for two hours, I was somewhere else.