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Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Now on HBO Max, Last Night in Soho shows unequivocal creative progression from director Edgar Wright. Best known for witty satirical comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright tackles horror — with bits of comedy, rest assured — more directly than ever before with Soho, which wraps Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy inside an ambitious neo-giallo Hammer-style thriller. Sound delectable? It should.
LAST NIGHT IN SOHO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We hear an LP crackle, and we can’t get judgy, because Wright has showcased his physical-format fetish since 2004, when Pegg and Frost frisbee’d vinyl at zombies in Shaun of the Dead. Ellie (McKenzie) spins old ’60s records on her vintage suitcase turntable and dances joyously about the house in a dress made of newspapers, and she hasn’t even gotten the good news yet. Her grandmother brings her a letter: She’s been accepted at the London College of Fashion. She wants to be a designer; she makes her own clothes. She’s head-over-tuckus in love with the idea of London from several decades past — the music, the style, the groovy vibes. Gran reminds her that it also can be a bad, dangerous place — “London can be a lot” — but how can you stop a young woman from living her life and pursuing a dream? Risks must be taken, or you’re not doing either.
So Ellie departs rural Cornwall and arrives in urban London. Her cabbie to Soho is a creep (“Maybe I’m your first stalker!” he declares) and her dormitory roommate, Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), is a catty snob who quickly unites the mean girls against the naif from the sticks. The school party scene ain’t her bag, either, so she answers a hand-scrawled bulletin-board ad for a bedsit in an old house owned by Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg, in her final role), a crotchety-nice lady who’s lived there forever and has a rule about not bringing boys over after 8 p.m. The room looks like it hasn’t been touched since 1966, and the neon sign for the neighboring French bistro sits right outside the window, blinking red then blue, red then blue, red then blue. It’s perfect. Too perfect?
Ellie lies in the bed with the neon blinking. She sits up and sees in the mirror what can possibly only be described as her time-warp alter-ego, Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Where Ellie is demure, overwhelmed by culture shock, Sandie is bold, confident. Wearing a pink tulle dress and cat-eye makeup, her hair styled in a kind of flipped-bob bouffant, Sandie strides into Cafe de Paris like she owns the place, intent on wowing someone, the owner, anybody, with her sexy airs and cooing, seductive singing voice. Sandie walks by a mirror and it’s not her reflection, but Ellie in her pajamas, watching.
The alarm blares and Ellie awakes with a start. A dream? Or something else? It happens again the next night, and she sketches Sandie’s dress in design class and heads to the salon to turn her mousy brown into platinum blond with bangs and turns down an offer to hang with kindly gent John (Michael Ajao) because she knows when she goes home she can drift away into that succulent time and be someone else, Sandie, who sure seems to have the world at her exquisitely manicured fingertips. At first it’s great and then it’s not, and you probably know that, but that’s also all I’m going to say.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The protracted revival of Dario Argento’s Suspiria should be celebrated, and it’s an obvious touchpoint here, along with Deep Red and Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. VHS dweebs will likely cite more obscure inspirations for Wright, and to them I say, knock yourselves out.
Performance Worth Watching: There’s a good chance Soho might not function without the relentless commitment to character of its two leads. McKenzie takes an astute angle on the wide-eyed urban neophyte; she’s lovable, and perhaps easily seduced, but not so quick to submit in the face of adversity, be it pragmatic or, well, supernatural. And Taylor-Joy is beguiling, a damn sight to behold, playing a character who’s far more than the sum of her parts.
Memorable Dialogue: Sandie (singing): “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go — downtown.”
Sex and Skin: Disturbing non-nude sex scenes; a brief glimpse of naked-guy ghosts.
Our Take: It’s certainly bold for Wright to produce a piece about the pitfalls of nostalgia, considering how he’s famous for crafting unapologetic elbow-in-the-ribs homages to zombie movies and buddy-cop action-comedies, which played like open hugs to the things he grew up loving. Notably, he didn’t tackle Soho’s sumptuous homage to the swinging ’60s by himself. He has story credit for Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ screenplay, which allows the director to chase his vision while the story pursues darker themes of sexual predation and violence — you know, the stuff of so, so many horror films.
Sandie’s attempt to be “the next Cilla Black” — mirrored by Ellie’s throwback-fashionista dreams — sadly, predictably, becomes a repulsive story about exploitation and masculine power; the good old days for men were so often bad old days for women. The film firmly asserts that simplistic reminiscences upon style and song are troublesome, dangerous. Beyond its glossy pastiche, it isn’t interested in romanticizing anything, and is all the stronger for it. It does not tread lightly, but it definitely does Golightly.
As is one of his trademarks, Wright jam-packs the film with music, frequently staged as witty needledrops. Note an early scene in which Ellie bumps her turntable and Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love” skips and repeats the line “She may come, I know not when,” a clever bit of foreshadowing; Taylor-Joy’s performance of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” transforms the song’s blend of optimism and isolation into bleak irony. Such thoughtfulness extends to the movie’s visual inventiveness, Wright using long, heavily choreographed shots to immerse us in Ellie’s idealized version of 1960s Soho, and camera tricks to create a dreamlike atmosphere.
As Ellie becomes deeply entrenched in what appears to be an inescapable delusion, Soho becomes delightfully unpredictable — is it a ghost story, time-travel fantasy, psychological thriller or drama about a young woman’s creeping psychosis? It’s all of the above, more for the better, slightly for worse as it devolves into boilerplate B-horror during a somewhat jumbled third act. The film is sometimes a case of Wright being so infatuated with the art of making films, he crams in so many of the storytelling elements he loves at the expense of tonal coherence. This is a quibble, though, in every little, piddling sense of the word. He stages a key sequence, set on Halloween, in which McKenzie and Ajao paint themselves as panda-eyed ghosts, and they careen from nightclub dancefloor to Soho streets to her very haunted bedsit, and it’s as euphoric as it is terrifying — and there are several more exhilarating stretches of film on par with it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. In a sense, Last Night in Soho tends to be a collection of crazy, imaginative moments more than a fully formed creative vision — but the thought of not watching it for that reason strikes me as flat-out ludicrous.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
