Secret Cinema goes clubbing

For the best part of a decade, Secret Cinema has been recreating the world of various iconic films, and inviting us along to enjoy them. They’ve shown Star Wars in a recreation of the Death Star, complete with a Darth Vadar and Luke Skywalker face off, and Back To The Future in a full scale version of Hill Valley. While for these recent larger productions, Secret Cinema has started announcing what the film is beforehand, initially the whole idea was to not let on what movie you were going to be watching before the event, (Secret, geddit?) and let you figure it out when you got there from the world they’d painstakingly created.

For their latest edition they took things back to basics, and announced a one-off showing in a secret South London location over Easter weekend. Now, when we put our super sleuth skills to the test and worked out that this so-called secret location was suspiciously close to Ministry of Sound on Google Maps, we had an incline that there might be a clubbing angle to proceedings and thought best we check it out.

Lining up against the wall outside the club, we’re slowly ushered in, while actors dressed in what looks like 90s sports gear and smoking seemingly never-ending cigarettes run up and down the length of the queue, shouting in German accents at the crowd and asking for a light and swigs of beer.

When we get into Ministry, we’re hit by a blast of pounding techno from Ministry’s world-famous system, as the actors who were previously outside congregate in the middle of the dancefloor and start to dance in that boisterous way, usually only seen in old rave footage. Now, being in Ministry of Sound at 6.30 in the evening, sober, with heavy techno blasting in your face is kind of disorientating, and the crowd, varying massively in age and demographic, do that weird thing of hovering round the edge of the dancefloor, and placing an invisible barrier between themselves and the actors. Remember the way girls and boys would naturally separate themselves at primary school discos? It’s a bit like that.

Clearly there’s a dance music element to the film we’re about to see, and the gathered crowd is visibly wracking their collective brains trying to work out what the hell it’s going to be. Human Traffic? Na, that’s a bit more 90s super clubs and reaching for the lasers than filthy techno rave. Maybe it’s 90s German heist movie Run Lola Run, with its relentless techno soundtrack and Berlin setting.

After an hour or so, and enough drinks to limber the audience up for the rave experience, the crowd’s ushered into Ministry’s main room and treated to a screening of brand new Berlin set thriller ‘Victoria’. The movie is audaciously filmed in a single shot, and follows protagonist Victoria as she befriends a group of Berlin wrong’uns she meets in a club, leading to dangerous consequences as night turns to day. The film’s a tense and nervous thrill ride with hardly any let up for its 140 minutes running time. As challenging to watch as it is exhilarating at times, the slightly disorientating sensation of being in Ministry of Sound at 6.30 in the evening only adds to the experience and starts to make loads more sense when viewed in conjunction with the film. “We wanted to create the mood and feeling of the film and allow the audience to enter that world,” explains Secret Cinema founder Fabian Riggall afterwards, and they did a damn good job of achieving that.

While a few punters who bought tickets for the show not knowing what the film was seem disappointed (‘My sister came before and it was The Grand Budapest Hotel’, one disappointingly tells us) it does show Secret Cinema are still willing to take chances and not just ply their audience with films and experiences they already know they’re going to love.

Victoria is in UK cinemas now and Secret Cinema presents 28 Days Later takes place in London between April 14 - May 29