The audience you’re with can have a big effect on your film experience, and I don’t just mean whether or not you get some inconsiderate popcorn rustlers, drink slurpers, mid-movie texters, man-spreaders or even vapers in your screen. Especially for films which are designed to evoke more audible reactions from their audiences (for example laughs in comedies), the reaction of those around you, and the atmosphere subsequently built by that, can impact your own viewing experience.

I’ve been struck by this especially recently upon viewing two films for the second time at the cinema – both blackly comic, and both not the most mainstream. I went to see Three Billboards Outisde Ebbing, Missouri for a second time around a month after it had come out, and just before the Oscars. The cinema itself was emptier (the first time I’d seen it had been in opening week with a bigger crowd, and one, I imagine, more likely more interested in seeing the film early into its release), and with a film as divisively darkly comic as Martin McDonagh’s (you don’t know whether to laugh or recoil at many moments), not everyone finds all of its comedy funny, and even less so in a less crowded room. Therefore, when you laugh and only one or two others do, it sometimes feels as though the sound stays in the room, making you more conscious of the silence surrounding it. A similar thing happened when I went to see Thoroughbreds a second time, albeit the difference was much more noticeable as my first viewing had been at the London Film Festival premiere of the film. Going from an excited festival crowd filled with film lovers, with the film itself being introduced by those who made it, to a small group who had ventured out to see this quirky indie, the change was palpable.

If you’re watching films with others, it is always more enjoyable to feel that collective experience, rather than feel the odd one out with a crowd. Even if you go to the cinema alone, you are with others, all enjoying the film together, therefore a more interactive audience means that your reactions don’t echo so loudly. Likewise, if you go with a friend to a film you’ve picked and they don’t seem to be enjoying it, it can take away from your experience (better to head off to those experimental indies alone sometimes). The difference of watching a film alone, at home, without any fellow audience is there isn’t that feeling of silence. You can enjoy a film, and as the only person there to, it doesn’t feel as though there’s that echo around your laughter. The opposite is true too, though, if more people are laughing around you, it can be infectious and make you more likely to laugh too. When there is a general sense of enjoyment in a room it can brighten the atmosphere (and perhaps make you enjoy the film a bit more).

Of course, the size of an audience ups your chances of having more people get the film’s jokes (or actually audibly laugh), for example, but it also helps to build up the atmosphere. More people tend to create more excitement in the room, especially if it’s a film’s opening weekend, for example, or the release of a widely anticipated film. It can make the film feel like more of an event and make it more likely that you’ll be in the frame of mind to make the most of it.

Sometimes we might see a film at the cinema and it won’t quite click if we’re aware of others not enjoying it. Sometimes you watch a film alone at home that you think you’d have enjoyed more with an audience. It’s always worth heading out to the cinema, but occasionally you might have to give a film a second chance.