Review - The Second Chance Cinema by Thea Weiss

The Second Chance Cinema

Thea Weiss
HarperCollins, 7 October 2025
Available as: PB, 320pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780008769185

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Second Chance Cinema to consider for review.

Ellie and Drake seem very different, but complementary to one another - she a cataloguer of vanishing places, always on the lookout for the quirky, the picturesque, the vintage, he a construction expert, safe and reliable, always fixing things. So, in many ways an ideal couple.

As the two plan their marriage, however, both worry about secrets they are keeping. 

And then one night, as Ellie (of course) leads them off the beaten track, they stumble across a hidden cinema with its own, special, midnight show - The Story of You. Those secrets will be revealed, and the two will have to face some uncomfortable truths.

I adored The Second Chance Cinema. I always think there's something magical about a cinema, something liminal as one steps out of one's normal life for a while. The darkness. The anticipation. It's especially magical when you have the whole place to yourself - as though the world has, just for a brief while, bent itself around you. For Ellie and Drake, that's literally true as they attend showing after showing, taking each of them deeper and deeper into their backstories - and revealing their pasts to each other.

This is a brilliant way to tell how two people came to be who they are, and to expose the dilemmas and tensions they now face. Across the screen flit parents, siblings, childhood insecurities, teenage angst, lovers, breakups, and betrayals. "To know all is to forgive all" runs the old saying, but will that be true for Ellie and Drake? Rather, it seems likely that with more perfect knowledges comes judgement, misunderstanding and pain. Yes, you may see what happened to your lover on a certain night ten years before, but will you understand? And are they the same person now as they were then? Is it fair to judge them on that past?

As the showings continue, the revelations affect Ellie and Drake, with things done, or left undone, in the past reaching out and putting their lives and relationship in question. Ellie's fears that she can't recapture her best work, and Drake's frustration that instead of building lovely, bespoke homes he's working on cookie-cutter residential boxes, tangle with family tensions and past relationships to make this a complex but rich account of a couple's situation. At the same time there's a good sprinkling of magical Christmas sparkle and humour to lighten the more intense moments.

All in all I found The Second Chance Cinema a compelling read - Weiss takes her fantastical premise and grounds it sufficiently enough that it seems real, with the authentic consequences for Ellie and Drake. It is in some ways an unsettling story, with real challenges for the couple, but it's one I had to keep reading - a "what if" that I had to follow to the last page.

For more information about The Second Chance Cinema, see the publisher's website here.