Once you’ve taken your seat in the cinema auditorium, there may be others arriving in your row who make you squeeze in as they pass.
All this is fine up until the commercials and film previews begin and the cinema hall is darkened. So, there are those who arrive during the previews, stumbling around in the dark: they can’t find their row, they don’t know which seat their ticket is for.
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At best they just walk past you, completely blocking out the screen. If you’re unlucky, they’ll even step on you.
If a mobile phone rings during the film that was forgotten to be muted, but it is quickly turned off, then it’s not the end of the world. It’s much worse if you have a person sitting in your field of vision who is tapping away on the phone throughout the film, browsing or scrolling through Facebook or Instagram – usually at maximum brightness, of course.
The worst of the worst. Occasionally whispering something during a film to the person you’re with is fine. After all, the sound of the cinema will drown it anyway and no one else will hear it. But it happens sometimes that a group of people are sitting in who know absolutely nothing about cinema etiquette and behave during the film as if they were at home. They talk to each other loudly – almost shouting – and comment on what they have seen.
