An all-nighter at ‘the most depraved and beautiful movie theatre in London’

It's 10.45pm and a queue is building in Soho. Nervous newcomers clutch bags of blankets and cheap energy drinks; old hands nod at one another, pull at the lapels of their leather jackets.

“I heard it gets easier as the night goes on,” someone says.

“That’s not true. He’s messing with you.”

You’d be forgiven for staring: young punks and balding smokers, pretty girls and wide-eyed boys. They hum with the nervous, chatty energy of votaries arriving at a ritual. Which, of course, they are. This is the Mystery Movie Marathon at the Prince Charles Cinema.

The “world’s favourite cinema” is beloved of directors from Quentin Tarantino to Emerald Fennell. “It’s like tuning into your favourite radio station,” says Paul Thomas Anderson. John Waters calls it “the most depraved and beautiful movie theatre in London”. But perhaps not for long. Leicester Square landlord, Criterion Capital, wants to hike its rent and introduce a six-month break clause in its lease. Criterion, owned by billionaire Asif Aziz, has recently closed another Soho institution, London’s Central YMCA. But the rebel alliance is striking back. An online petition to #savethepcc has gathered more than 160,000 signatures. Tonight’s showing is sold out and every ticket holder has consumed more than enough underdog narratives to know who deserves to prevail.

For decades, the Prince Charles has promised to screen films that no one else will; you still sense hints of its 70s days showing softcore porn. In the dim, pleather-padded bar, patrons scrawl film requests on the wall like prayers: Taxi Driver, they beg. Grease 2! Given 858 different films were screened last year, there’s a fair chance these wishes will be granted. But power rests in the divine hand of programming manager Paul Vickery.

Vickery is the architect of the marathon screenings – which have ranged from the full catalogue of Edgar Wright (music videos included) to a three-day binge of all 121 episodes of Lost. Since Vickery took up his post more than 16 years ago, the marathons have become a vital element of the calendar, inviting viewers to transform their relationship with the films and to the cinema space itself. “They’re the closest thing you can experience as an adult to [teenage] sleepovers,” he tells me, “watching films you were maybe a little too young to see at a time you should have been asleep.” Monthly, Vickery handpicks five films from the archive and presents them back to back. No hints. No repeats. “The freedom is both incredibly liberating and incredibly scary,” he says. As it should be. I’m about to entrust him with 11 hours of my life.

“Do you want some grapes?” Sam, in the next seat, asks. He’s come down from Leeds on his own for the night. It’s his first marathon. The theatre plunges into antsy darkness.

And then, in thin blue capitals, Warner Brothers presents… a crashing synth echo: Harrison Ford. Tommy Lee Jones. There are cheers and laughs for the stars of The Fugitive. The film was a box office smash, with six weeks at No 1 in the US and seven Academy Award nominations. Of course, most of us don’t know any of that. The experience of watching it unprepared is as close as you might come to the blindness of an audience experiencing it for the first time. Within 20 minutes, it delivers a murder, a death row conviction, a prison guard shootout, and a barrel-rolling bus slammed by a freight train. We’re off.

“How is it 2.30?” asks a girl two hours later in the toilet queue. I’m feeling OK, having put away half a box of popcorn. I sit on the stairs and stretch to my toes. Then we strap in again.

A Japanese man with a facial tic has arrived in America. After The Fugitive’s banter and roving cameras, the stark composition of film two feels spare to the point of withholding. If the first film was a Jack and coke, Takeshi Kitano’s Brother is a shot of Hibiki. It quickly becomes clear that our man, Yamamoto, is a killing machine, a yakuza who cannot help himself. “I’m at war in America too,” he laughs, after unloading several dozen rounds into the Hispanic competition. Murder in this universe has no consequence – or at least fails to attract law enforcement.

How interesting to have these crime worlds in conversation with one another, I think, and allow my eyes to drift closed. I awake two or 10 minutes later to another heart attack of bullets. In the end, it takes eight machine guns to bring Yamamoto down. But I’m still alive. I sink a coffee. It’s 4.30am.

Behind me, two people are quarrelling about the best David Lynch film. Blue Velvet, no! Eraserhead. “I’ve always made it to the end,” says one woman, a veteran of four previous marathons. “I sleep, but I always make it to the end.”