I lie on the floor in all-encompassing pitch-black – as if my eyeballs have been dipped in ink – and feel my heart thudding in my chest. “No one’s going to grab you,” I think, over and over, a 37-year-old woman reduced to box-breathing to stay calm in the face of overwhelming darkness. “It’s not going to happen. They said so on the briefing sheet. They promised.”
In fact, this child-like thought runs on repeat to the extent that I’m barely listening to Helena Bonham Carter’s purring, mildly creepy tones in my ears as she sets up a classic fairytale featuring a princess growing up in a palace. Moments earlier, I’d walked into a Nineties-era teenage girl’s bedroom, before being told to lie down on one of the beds on the floor. Then, all the lights went out.
