Ellie and Drake, a recently engaged couple, come across magical cinema one night down a fog covered alleyway. When they enter, they’re given ten tickets to see midnight movies that play them significant memories of their lives. Ellie wants to come back, hoping to find out more about a night she can’t remember clearly, while Drake is nervous about all the secrets that keep coming to light. Will the revealed secrets ruin their relationship?

The Second Chance Cinema is a debut novel from Thea Weiss, who works as a copywriter and screenwriter, including working on the Twilight movie franchise.

I really liked the premise for this novel. The way the cinema is described is magical and lush. It’s hidden down an alleyway and seems to only appear for those who need it. When they visit with friends, they find that it’s an abandoned building. But by midnight on Saturdays, it’s velvet and gold, and very beautiful. There’s even some amusing little banter between them and the two people who work there, and a running joke about how bad the popcorn is. The idea that you would get to see the most meaningful times of your life and be able to share them with the person you love the most is such a great idea to me, and also the little mystery of what Ellie can’t remember or what Drake might not have told her is a great hook.

However, the execution of the story undermines this a lot. At one point, near the end, we learn the cinema shows you what you most need to see to move forward, which is very different from just showing you your life and memories. And the memories that the cinema does show seem like very odd choices, if this is the case. How does seeing yourself as a baby fit this mission statement? Most of the memories chosen seem designed to break up relationships or at least cause drama and problems. They have to see each other sleep with other people, for example. Or go in depth with memories of past relationships. But it’s not clear how much of the others mind and feelings the other is privy to, so are they watching the scene, or able to know each others feelings during this? Is it video or memory? Do they know how the other person really felt at these times, as opposed to just how they were behaving? Unclear. Also, I’m not sure many relationships would recover from seeing these things and how this helps them move forward. For example, seeing your partner sleeping with someone else might not be something you could forget, neither would seeing them fall in love with someone else, maybe. Perhaps the cinema could have shown better moments that shaped them? Or even conversations that helped them change trajectory, rather than intimate moments? I’m not sure.

What did become clear was that neither Ellie nor Drake were very likable people. Ellie has an interesting talent for writing about failing businesses, feeling as though they speak to her, and being able to save them from being closed down. It feels borderline magical as a skill, but this is never developed. Ellie is written as highly emotionally avoidant and immature, and often quite petty and passive aggressive. Drake on the other hand is a romantic, which is mostly nice, but he comes across as very weak and kind of whiney, and later, when you find out about his past, you have to wonder if he actually likes Ellie at all, or if he just was afraid of being alone or something. It’s unclear to me why the cinema chose to show itself to them. Their relationship isn’t great and I’m not sure it deserved saving, but they’re also neither of them very nice, and don’t seem that deserving of the opportunity. Their deep seated emotional problems are conveniently wrapped up in a few pages at the end.

There were also a few small things that stood out to me that maybe needed more thought: a toilet stall door is made out of marble, which seemed odd. Somebody recanted something, when the author meant declaimed. And there’s also a shop called Flower + Flour which was a plant shop and bakery, which had me wondering about the food safety angle of pollen, soil, and potentially poisonous or inedible plant matter around baked goods. (Seemed like a lawsuit waiting to happen) Things like this take me out of the moment in books, though they may have changed some of them before publication, and make it hard to get into the book.

One thing I do want to call out about a lot of recent books lately, and that’s not to blame this book for this, is a lazy writing habit around POV. This book has Ellie as our lead for the first part of the book and then switches for a section at the end to Drake. When you’re in third person instead of first, you can just tell us the story, you don’t have to do this. You are the writer, you can tell us what’s going on inside more than one person at once. You can tell us how they react to each other and why, if you want to. It feels like authors recently see their MC as a kind of self insert, and they struggle to tell a story in third person. Here in this debut novel, I think this isn’t a major writing sin, but I feel like it can be really lazy and lacking in imagination.

To round this all up, this isn’t a bad debut novel, and I think the initial premise was very intriguing and creative. For me, it was hard to care about Ellie and Drake when I didn’t like them and didn’t think they really had a relationship worth saving, but I think this one will find it’s audience.

Read It If: you feel drawn to the magical cinema premise and like to read about difficult relationships.

With thanks to Simon & Schuster Canada for the ARC of this book for review.