Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho feels like the pop cover of a classic rock ballad – sure, it’s diverting enough and those involved are undoubtedly talented, but it’s still just an echo of something greater.
As the film begins, ‘60s obsessed Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie, Jojo Rabbit) has just been accepted to the London College of Fashion. She’s a sheltered, too-sweet country mouse with a cookie-cutter tragic backstory: Eloise’s mother died of some nondescript mental illness when she was a child, leaving her in her grandmother’s care. Oh, and she can see her mum’s ghost.
Soon enough, our young protagonist bravely heads to the big city… only to be roomed with apex bully Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen), the caricature of a ‘90s high school mean girl. After a short spell of merciless bullying, poor Eloise flees her student housing and finds a room in a Fitzrovia flat owned by the terse Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg, having great fun in her last role). She’s immediately enamoured with the place, even as the lights from a neighbouring French restaurant sign flood her room with alternating flashes of red and blue. It’s one of a number of stylistic choices that give Last Night in Soho the air of a candy-coated giallo horror; sometimes it works, others it feels visually immature.
Her first night there, Ellie drifts off effortlessly. Only, she wakes in front of the Coventry Street marquee for Thunderball – it’s Soho, 1965, and Ellie wanders through the streets in her pyjamas, dwarfed and adrift in neon glitz and glamour. It’s the first time of many that Ellie enters the life of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a magnetic blonde with dreams of being the next Cilla Black.
This first foray into the past gives way to the film’s best scene: a series of long takes that, thanks to digital magic, bold choreography, and lushly designed sets, show McKenzie and Taylor-Joy gliding over the dance floor, inhabiting the same space. Ellie alternates between participating in, and being an observer of, Sandie’s life; yet as she flits in and out of her beloved era, the lines between past and present inevitably begin to bleed.
As Sandie’s tale begins to turn darker and she falls prey to Jack’s (Matt Smith) promises of fame, Ellie’s dreams start to encroach on her waking hours. Haunted by memories of violence and stalked by faceless men only she can see, these visions send her spiralling deeper into hallucinatory isolation and she becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Sandie.
For its audience to be invested in solving this mystery, Last Night in Soho needs you to care about its protagonist. McKenzie tries hard to sell Ellie’s descent into madness but, as she’s asked to repeat the same wide-eyed note again and again, the tune turns from repetitive to grating. Meanwhile, Taylor-Joy’s character exists mostly to be brutalised by men and is, as such, near-devoid of an interior life. And even they are given more consideration than the one-tone archetypes making up the supporting ensemble (the characterisation of Ellie’s classmate and love interest, John, played by Michael Ajao, is nothing short of a crime against writing). It’s hard to care what happens to any of them when they barely feel like people.
Thematically, Last Night in Soho does not fare much better. Wright utilises Sandie to half-heartedly explore themes of female exploitation and sexual violence, and to cursorily warn against blind nostalgia for bygone eras – the latter can’t help but feel insincere, given how openly Wright worships the era’s aesthetics. Furthermore, the third act (which won’t be spoiled here) muddles its gender politics to the point where even the film seems unsure of what it’s saying.
The screenplay, co-written by Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is frustratingly unrealised. The film’s disparate elements, however attractive, spin around nothing: one can’t help but believe that a couple more drafts would have uncovered the spirit at Last Night’s core, something to bring the sum of its parts to a cohesive whole.
That said, credit where credit is due. Last Night in Soho has more than enough visual flair to keep the film from flagging. The soundtrack is consistently good, there’s great joy to be gleaned from the film’s campier moments (which you’ll wish it had leaned more into), and the cast is both incredibly talented and committed. From the sets to the costumes, the clever camera tricks to the delicious lighting, Last Night in Soho is undoubtedly a fun watch.
Edgar Wright has long since proven himself a fantastic, kinetic filmmaker, such that the promise of him doing a mix of horror and psychological thriller was reason enough to be excited. It’s because we’ve seen what Wright is capable of that this review examines Last Night in Soho under a particularly harsh light – what should have been a devilish delight, full of energy and ghoulish horror, proves instead a flimsy first pass at a script that otherwise had noble intentions.
Last Night In Soho releases in cinemas October 29th. Watch the trailer here.
