Secret Cinema: Boiler Suits, Radioheads & Adventures

Last Friday I embarked on what turned out to be one of the most surreal and worth-my-money experiences I have ever had. As a film lover I have always liked the idea of Secret Cinema, a completely different way of watching a movie, especially when you aren’t even sure what the film is. However, up until this year it has always passed me by and I always found out about it too late. Thankfully this year that wasn’t the case, and I jumped at the chance to sign up for what I thought would just be tickets to a secret venue, and watch a secret film. If that was it, I probably would have been satisfied. I was actually signing up for one hell of an awesome journey. Now that this year’s monthly run of Secret Cinema has come to an end, I shall report back to you my findings of a brilliant Friday night.

 The Secret Cinema experience started a few weeks leading up to the actual event. Even before I signed up there were these secret one-off ‘experiments’ and trials that fans could go and undertake to get into the spirit of the whole thing. After I purchased tickets I was forwarded onto a ‘recruitment’ website for a company named Brave New Ventures, where I had to select a job title and fill out a personality profile. My BNV ‘colleague’ Chris and I plumped for ‘Investment Aides’, purely because it meant that we had to bring with us a miniature toy figure of a human. I almost brought my William Shakespeare or Admiral Ackbar action figures, but we found two GI-Joe knock-offs that we decided to name Simon and Jimmy. The fact that they managed to rise up the ranks with those names is remarkable. We also had to come dressed in our profession uniform, a dark blue/grey boiler suit with the BNV logos. You could either purchase the official pre-made ones or make your own. We decided to go down the Blue Peter route.

On the day itself we arrived at the pre-determined meeting place by ‘engineer’ statue of Robert Stephenson at Euston Station, London. On the way there we were trying to work out what film it may be, as the limited information we could gather showed that it must be a sci-fi film involving scientific and biological expeditions. It turned out that we were right with our prediction in the end. We were pleased to see upon arrival that there were many others with boiler suits of different colours with their own accessories such as gaffer tape, plants, maps and ancient artefacts. It was already a great atmosphere around, and then two BNV guards came up to us and ushered us to follow him and wait in line. Somehow, Chris & I had managed to find ourselves right at the front of the queue of what was going to be 900 fellow BNV employees. Already worth the money. 

It then got even more surreal when I turned round and discovered that none other than Thom Yorke of Radiohead was in the queue laughing and joking, in a green boiler suit with his group of friends (I'm not a massive Radiohead fan, so for all I know the whole of the band was also there, apologies if so!). In all the towns in all the world ...

(Our strategic photo of Mr Thom Yorke)

The actors who played all the BNV employees were really impressive. They kept in character the whole time, and there were A LOT of them. A few came up to us in line and discussed our history with the company and what we were expecting, and then were taken in single file through a couple of Euston streets before we came across a large warehouse. Even on the way there, there were loads of actors parading up and down, and you could even hear a loud tannoy about BNV from the building from the outside. We were then ushered into a checking area where he handed our tickets over, and exchanged our UK money for BNV coloured tokens. We were also given name tags, and became Eames and Beaumont, which sounded like decent futuristic film character names (though I am aware Tom Hardy already nicked mine in Inception).


We then through decontamination of a light spray in our faces before going through a courtyard to find our personal areas. With so many things going on around us, and so many people that we weren’t sure were actors or patrons (we were all wearing similar clothes), it felt like the beginning intro of recent video games where you want to look around and experience everything as much as possible before the next stage. Here we purchased a welcome cider from a very happy BNV vendor, and soon hundreds of people, including Thom, were in the courtyard, to be greeted from the different team leaders. An android named David, further confirming my film prediction, showed us Investment Aides to the front of the building and up some stairs, before being greeted at an area that contained a groovy looking bar and sleeping booths. Here, we almost met ‘Mother’, a futuristic room of lights, where suddenly Stephen Stills’s ‘Love the One You’re With’ started playing and we were encouraged to dance. The night had got ever so stranger.

From here on in, we were encouraged to explore as much as we liked, and there was so much to see. Whenever you saw an open door or a flight of stairs, it led to a different, interesting room, each with actors and props. These included a flight deck, mess hall, a ‘Tron Pong’ games room, an infirmary, a laboratory and much more. 




There were also a couple of bars and food halls to recoup and recharge, but still remaining within the canon of the evening. With each minute, you became fully immersed into the experience, and at times, it felt strangely real. I wanted to stop giggling with excitement in order to remain in character. Sometimes the actors would interact with you and give you mini-missions, and it was quite fun to improvise and pretend to be part of the story. We even invented backstories for ourselves. At one point we here handed a large case of god-knows-what and told to take to the hangar, though we probably weren't supposed to take it down three flights of stairs. So, we even managed to have an accidental mini-workout during the evening!

A couple of hours later, flashing lights and buzzes went off, and we were told to get into the ‘Hypersleep’ areas by the walls to get ready for takeoff. After a countdown, it all went dark, and Radiohead’s haunting ‘Everything in its Right Place’ started playing, which confirmed our celebrity-spot earlier. After completing our two years in deep freeze, we awakened to continue exploring. At times, we were a bit concerned because we felt like we should have been with our fellow Investment Aides, as the other professions appeared to be in designated places, but we figured it didn’t really matter where you were. While we were chilling in the mess hall, suddenly a group of BNV guys were dealing with a sick man on the ground, and they cornered him off with a load of that gaffer tape from earlier on. While we kneeled down to make sure he was ‘OK’, more and more employees began to act weirdly and fell to the ground with some kind of virus. As Martin Lawrence once said, sh*t just got real. We were told to get down to the huge hangar, which housed some awesome looking vehicles, and Beaumont and I were suddenly holding gaffer tape to corner off some infected explorers returning from outside the spacecraft. We then legged it with a load of others and found ourselves right in the thick of some serious action, holding the tape, cornering off the infected, making sure they didn’t touch us. At times, it felt incredibly exciting, and ridiculously immersive. The big warehouse doors then opened and we were told to run outside, and suddenly hundreds of us were jogging in the open air sunshine towards the ‘escape pods’.

With all the excitement, you could be forgiven if you completely forgot you were there to watch a film. The pods housed the two large cinema screens, where we were able to replenish our fluids and grab some popcorn. After grabbing two great seats and a pair of 3D glasses, we were treated to Bjork’s hauntingly erotic video to ‘All is Full of Love’, before 'Captain' Ridley Scott appeared on screen to introduce the film, and say good luck and well done on our mission so far.

The film began, and we were delighted to find that our prediction of Prometheus was correct. We were particularly pleased as we had yet to see the film, and had been looking forward to doing so, and we couldn’t have picked a better way of doing it! So many little parts of the film made the evening make so much more sense. Little nods to the evening’s events were there on screen, such as the anroid David (Michael Fassbender), the hangar’s vehicles, the actors’ outfits and even Idris Elba’s character sang the chorus to the Stephen Stills track from earlier.

The whole evening was a monumental success. I had never experienced anything like this before, and I was highly impressed. The amount of effort and epicness to the whole affair was incredible. The actors’ ability to remain in character and time their actions, the amazing props and decked out rooms, even the logistical nightmare of making sure everyone was where they needed to be and safely doing so, all contributed to a fantastic evening. My money was well spent, and at just over £30 each, it was a steal. I highly recommend people to sign up as soon as possible for their next instalment, whatever it may be. It almost feels a bit rubbish watching any film from now on without the same immersiveness (if that's even a word)!