Limerick, 1984, rests on the lip of a cultural tremor: the moment humans began taking their dreams home in plastic boxes. David Gleeson compresses that shift inside The Royal, a single-screen theater that feels like a crumbling keep against the rising Cine-isolationism of the VHS age.
Magnetic tape hangs over the lobby like a domestic specter, ready to shrink communal viewing into a private household errand. Colin Morgan plays Earl Clancy, a man who treats the family business as a sacred burden passed down by his father. He carries the stiff spine of industrial-era stoicism, with all the emotional fluency of a locked filing cabinet.
The world moves toward living-room convenience, and Earl clings to the shared dark. His brother Gerald reads the situation through accounts and fatigue, pressing for a sale to Harry Conway (Stanley Townsend), a local businessman who sizes up the property with carrion patience. Their clash sharpens during a single evening screening of Breathless, a title with a sour little joke baked into it, since the theater itself seems to be running out of air. The lobby smells of stale popcorn, damp history, and the queasy knowledge that an era is slipping away.
The Mechanical Anxiety of the 15-Minute Reel
The film runs on mechanical panic, taking its rhythm from the technology it honors. The projectionist is missing, so Earl must bolt to the booth every fifteen minutes to change the physical reels. That device gives the story a nervous pulse, a perpetual-crisis-loop that mirrors the instability of 1980s working-class life. The building joins the revolt. Pipes burst. Rodents scatter. Technical failures threaten the show. The place becomes a machine coughing up its own decline.
These disruptions carry symbolic weight. The Royal’s ailments echo the systemic decay facing regional Ireland at the time, where inherited structures, cultural habits, and local institutions strain under economic pressure. Harry Conway drifts through the film like a forecast of corporate takeover.
He represents a future that prices culture by square footage and profit margin. Gerald’s complaints give voice to exhaustion, the bone-deep tiredness of people asked to fight “progress” with a mop, a wrench, and a sense of duty.
Earl’s daughter Kate and the staff feed the controlled mania. They form a small, fraying society bound to a sinking ship, and their collective panic gives the film its pulse. The evening becomes a ninety-minute civic stress test, a miniature of a community trying to preserve its rituals as the walls leak in real time. It is funny, then sad, then funny again, which feels about right for any institution approaching death with terrible plumbing.
Analogue-Reverie and the Tactile Body of Film
Gleeson filmed at the defunct Royal Cinema on Cecil Street, and the choice leaves fingerprints on every frame. The walls seem to remember things. They may also remember asbestos, which is less poetic, yet somehow apt. The film presents the space with grime, fatigue, and stubborn dignity. It avoids polished nostalgia. Its romance has dirt under its nails.
Tracey O’Hanlon’s production design fills the background with 1984’s cultural debris. Posters for Ghostbusters and Red Dawn become little portals into a distant pop-culture climate, markers of a world peering toward fantasy, militarized anxiety, and commercial spectacle. Against that scenery, The Royal feels like a relic still trying to function as a civic organ.
The camera participates in this analogue-reverie. Gleeson uses scratches and frame shudders tied to reel changes, mimicking the worn print as a living surface. Film here has a body. It can scar, tremble, stutter, and survive another reel if somebody reaches the booth in time.
The auditorium becomes a hazy cavern of cigarette smoke and flickering light, a sensory environment that may feel strange to younger viewers raised on cleaner modern megaplexes. The detail matters because it gives the story a lived-in texture. The whirr of the projector becomes the movie’s heartbeat, a reminder that cinema’s illusion once required muscle, timing, grease, and a tolerance for small disasters.
The Secular Cathedral and the Spirit of the Gathering
The film’s strongest idea is the theater as a secular cathedral, a house of collective-echoing. The rowdy audience turns spectatorship into a social ritual through heckling, shared laughter, and noisy participation. These scenes recall a period when the cinema acted like a town square with better lighting and worse ventilation. The act of watching becomes public life.
Earl’s movement from prickly, resentful manager to quiet heroic figure gives the film its emotional anchor. Colin Morgan plays the shift with restrained intensity. Earl begins as a man trapped by legacy, bound to his father’s inheritance like a curse with ticket stubs. He grows into someone who understands that his service has communal value. The change is modest, even awkward, which makes it persuasive.
The 1980s appear without cartoonish exaggeration. Hair and costumes feel period-accurate, free of the neon-drenched clichés that often flatten retrospective pieces. The film suggests that entertainment formats change and the human need for shared space persists.
A sequence involving a singing audience marks a major tonal swerve, moving into sweeter territory that may jar some viewers. The film takes a gamble on sincerity. That gamble shifts the piece from gritty survival tale to warm tribute, emphasizing the spirit of the gathering as the building crumbles around it.
Once Upon a Time in a Cinema is a nostalgic Irish comedy-drama that captures the chaotic charm of the celluloid era. Directed by David Gleeson, the film premiered as the opening gala for the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2026 before its wide theatrical release on May 1, 2026. Set in a run-down, single-screen theater in 1984 Limerick, the story follows beleaguered manager Earl Clancy as he fights to save his family’s legacy during a single, disaster-prone Friday night screening. As of today, May 12, 2026, the film is currently screening in cinemas across Ireland through Break Out Pictures and continues to resonate with audiences as a heartfelt love letter to the communal movie-going experience.
Full Credits
Title: Once Upon a Time in a Cinema
Distributor: Break Out Pictures, A Contra Corriente
Release date: May 1, 2026
Rating: 15A
Running time: 92 minutes
Director: David Gleeson
Writers: David Gleeson
Producers and Executive Producers: Nathalie Lichtenthaeler, Judy Tossell, Kirk D’Amico, Laurent Jacobs, Tara Doolan, Cloè Garbay, Bastien Sirodot, Trish Vasquez
Cast: Colin Morgan, Calam Lynch, Niamh Cusack, Clara Crichton, Daniel Woodage, India Mullen, Stanley Townsend, Elaine O’Dwyer, Andrew Bennett, Aidan Crowe, Dean Panter, Stuart Mackey, Samuel Duggan, Jonty Ross, Sean Shinners, Cos Egan, Ryan Bourke, Michael Casey, Ollie Ryan, Shane Davis, Ian Dillon
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Hyun De Grande
Editors: Bertrand Conard, John Murphy
Composer: Perrine Virgile
The Review
Once Upon A Time In A Cinema
David Gleeson provides a tactile tribute to the dying light of the analogue era. This movie serves as a vital reminder of our lost communal rituals. Colin Morgan delivers a performance that anchors the technical chaos in genuine human stakes. Despite a late shift toward the sentimental, the work remains a sincere meditation on why we gather in the dark. It offers a gritty, authentic slice of Irish history through a lens of technical reverence.
PROS
- Colin Morgan portrays the mounting pressure of the night with a believable, prickly intensity.
- Filming on location at the defunct Royal Cinema provides a level of historical grit that studio sets cannot replicate.
- The use of intentional film scratches and shudders adds a sensory layer that honors the physical medium of celluloid.
- The production design captures the 1980s with grounded realism rather than relying on neon-drenched parodies.
CONS
- The script attempts to juggle too many subplots, which leaves some character arcs feeling unresolved.
- A late shift toward a sentimental audience singalong feels jarring compared to the earlier gritty realism.
- Certain supporting characters function more as obstacles for the protagonist rather than fully realized individuals.
