Edgar Wright doesn’t want to be the comedy guy anymore. It makes sense that after making his name directing some of the best comedies of the twenty-first century (and also one of the best Brit-coms as well), he would want to chase something different -even while he was expanding the scope of what a comedy could do. The last decade has largely been one of him trying to diversify his output. After finishing his Cornetto trilogy with the extremely underrated The World’s End in 2013, he hasn’t gone back to that well. He can’t quite escape his roots though, there’s an undercurrent of comedy permeating his 2017 action movie Baby Driver, and his astounding documentary debut from earlier this year, The Sparks Brothers, is made with a lot of clever wit and funny devices. Last Night in Soho though, a time-travelling psychological horror, is a true experiment, a real test of his versatility.
Of course even at his most versatile, Wright is nothing if not a fan of pastiche. For a movie that is so in love with the 1960s, Last Night in Soho perhaps owes more to horror movies of the 1970s, such as Don’t Look Now, Suspiria, and Robert Altman’s Images (though Wright does cite 1965’s Repulsion as a particular influence too). Like those, this film makes use of rich colour palettes and strong photography and editing choices to create its’ mood. It’s plot is also similarly honed in on a mystery, one that may be informed by supernatural phenomena or simply the product of a troubled mind.
Thomasin McKenzie plays this figure: Eloise or “Ellie”, a girl from the countryside with a fixation on the 1960s and still carrying residual trauma from a family tragedy, moving to London for the first time to study fashion design. Occupying an old bedsit near Soho in the constant glow of the neon lights emanating from a bistro next door, she is whisked away in her dreams to the 1960s West End and the world of an aspiring singer called Sandie, played by the always radiant Anya Taylor-Joy -whom Ellie lives through and quite literally reflects as the visions become more intense and disturbing, seeping their way into her waking life.
It's something akin to Midnight in Paris played as horror, right down to the theme of the deceptive allure of nostalgia for another time -a theme Wright has tackled before. Ellie is in love with the 1960s but doesn’t much consider its’ imperfections. While there is that classy romance to the period, it isn’t long before the darker shades start to become apparent. That gradual disillusionment is illustrated very well through Wright’s subtle connectivity of Ellie and Sandie’s experiences -sexism is a big one, as both young women have to deal with the attentions of predatory men. In Sandie’s case, it’s powerful people in London’s political and entertainment scene; in Ellie’s, it’s a creepy cab driver and a creepier old man (Terrence Stamp).
Last Night in Soho is all about mirrors, of both the literal and metaphorical variety. Mirrors are of course the films’ most prominent motif, appearing everywhere in the dreams and with a sizable presence in Ellie’s contemporary life too. Ellie is constantly seen as an inverse of Sandie and vice versa, her reflection beautifully incorporated into windows and glass during the dream sequences. The womans’ identities are viscerally intertwined, which Wright visualizes in extremely exciting ways -the best being an elaborate dance scene in which camera tricks and staging allows the two to transform into one another in step with the number. Occasionally they are even merged Persona-like as Ellie gains a degree of agency in these visions -but it also further blurs the lines of Ellie and Sandie, dream and reality. Indeed, Ellie sees Sandie as a kind of aspirational alter ego, setting about transforming herself into that role by dying her hair and stylizing herself decidedly more to Sandie’s aesthetic. It’s very much like Vertigo, and is equally ominous here. And yet what happens when that mirror image begins to deviate from fantasy, when it starts to turn on you?
It begins in a bleak nightclub where Ellie after leaving Sandie on the high road to success, sees her instead as merely a backup dancer to her managers’ next big find. As we learn more about how disposable Sandie is, how the duplicitous Jack (Matt Smith) is actually using her, Wright’s horror manifests in new and curious ways. He demonstrates considerable talent for building psychological intensity with stark expressionism and hypnotic visual choices. The horror is linked to misogyny and exploitation, but most specifically prostitution, which is revealing both of Ellie and Wright. Ellie’s relationship to Sandie most drastically changes with the discovery of her sex work, reflecting a moral judgement on Ellie’s part -Ellie who in her sexual anxiety looked to Sandie as a kind of sexual role model. Wright likewise equates prostitution with misogynist power structures, concentrating emphatically on that as the primary source of Sandie’s despair and Ellie’s terror, to the point the ghosts that haunt the latter are those of Sandie’s many clients. This casts sex work as the most horrifying and demeaning fate for a young woman, and to a point reduces Sandie’s story to being one of a mere 'fallen woman'.
Problematic though this is, it is effective, largely through Wright’s expertise. His mood is chilling, his suspense haunting, his violence enticing (there’s a wonderful ‘knife shot’ that refracts Ellie’s visage in the blade) and he viscerally evokes Ellie’s frightful mental state the further down this rabbit hole she goes. Of course McKenzie’s performance adds a lot to that, and the stand-out star of Jojo Rabbit proves once again a valuable new talent. She is perfectly sympathetic in her innocent, introverted nature while astonishingly raw in her hysteria, balancing every fragile facet of Ellie with unconventional prowess -and will probably be overlooked as a factor in how the movie works. Meanwhile, Taylor-Joy gets to branch out beyond the simple definitions of Sandie, and to Wright’s credit the character does eventually overturn her archetype in a dramatic way that suits Taylor-Joy’s talents nicely. Between this film and The Forgiven, Matt Smith is really finding a second windfall playing scumbags -he’s genuinely frightening here; while his mirror love interest for Ellie marks a solid debut by the sweet Michael Ajao. Last Night in Soho also happens to be the final film appearance of Diana Rigg, playing Ellie’s landlady, and it’s a part that she’s rather excellent in.
Where the movie does lose some steam though is in its’ last act, about the time murder enters the picture and becomes the primary focus of Ellie’s obsession; and when the supernatural becomes slightly more than implied. Here, though the film is just as stylistically engaging, Wright’s narrative choices become notably less inspired. Ellie and Sandie's connection becomes looser, more individualistic. And of two of the most likely plot twists, Wright throws you for a red herring on one, but fulfils the other without much surprise. His climax aims for a mixture of shock and catharsis, and doesn’t really achieve either –it’s less scary than the stuff leading up to it, bewildering though it may be. It also obfuscates the movies’ ethics to an extent, as well as how we should feel about Sandie as her story comes to an unremarkable close.
It’s a reminder that while Wright might be playing in the sandbox of Nicolas Roeg or Dario Argento, he isn’t quite on equal footing. But it’s hardly enough to ruin the film, which is in many ways as sharp and impressive as Wright’s other work. Last Night in Soho is shot by Chung Chung-hoon, regular cinematographer of Park Chan-wook, and the film consequently feels more dangerous and disturbing –helped by Wright’s usage of a lot of in-house effects. While not meant to be an afterthought, I’d also note too his customary exceptional use of music, and especially Taylor-Joy’s cover of Petula Clark’s “Downtown”, which eerily reverberates through the movie. It’s pacing and editing is more restrained than Wright’s other films, it lacks the energy, and that’s not a mark against it. Again, Wright set out to make something different yet still relatively distinct, and for both his own career and the movie industry as it stands, he did that and generally very well.
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