Many of us knew this person in our younger days: the kid in your dorm or working your same shift who was obsessed with the trappings of another era. Maybe they yearned for New York City in the 1970s, in all its grit and pre-AIDS hedonism, or they fancied themselves a little Mad Men suave. Attached to this pretension (usually connected to fashion, film, and music) was, typically, an ignorance of any harder realities of the era they craved, because such deeper understanding could never really be part of the pose.
Writer-director Edgar Wright sets out to, in some senses, punish just such a person in his new psychological thriller Last Night in Soho (co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns), about a modern young woman whose fixation with swinging-’60s London is proven horribly naive. Wright pities her, too, just as he pities a lineage of women who were victims of the misogyny of their time. It’s unclear if Last Night in Soho is supposed to be a campy homage to past horror—with its Eyes of Laura Mars visions and Suspiria swirls—or if it’s meant as sobering social critique. Maybe it’s both? Either way, little of it works.
Thomasin McKenzie—the actor who first wowed in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace and who goes drifting through the background of this year’sThe Power of the Dog, from Jane Campion—plays Eloise, or Ellie, an aspiring fashion designer from the Cornwall countryside who moves to London for school with a wide-eyed hunger. Raised by her gran after her mother’s death by suicide, Ellie is half-tenacious, half-babe in the woods. This combination earns her the instant disdain of her school housing roommate, an apex bully, and her instant pack of henchmen. The film wants us to believe that fashion students in 2020 (ish) would belittle a first-year student who shows up in clothing she designed herself, rather than in established designer couture. It wants us to believe a lot of things that don’t feel right.
Shunned by her peers but still determined to rescue her great London dream, Ellie moves to a creepy old bedsit owned by a creaky old lady, Miss Collins (the late, great Diana Rigg). Ellie rather loves this shabby spot, as it brings her closer to the mid-century yesteryear she feels she was probably meant to live in. And then, what curious and spectral joy! As Ellie sleeps in her new bed on the first night, she is whisked off into a very lucid dream reverie, where she witnesses, or has become, an aspirant Londoner of the 1960s, a singer and dancer looking to break into the nightclub circuit. She’s now Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), whose life is exactly the kind of fledgling fabulous that Ellie wants for herself. In her waking life, Ellie diligently goes about her design work, and gets a job at a local pub. But she longs for the sweet escape of sleep, where she can pick up with the next chapter of Sandy’s journey.
Things do, of course, begin to sour. Dreaming bleeds into daytime consciousness, sending Ellie down a predictable path of hallucinatory isolation. Early in the film, it is established that Ellie can maybe see ghosts, but heretofore it had only been her loving mother, popping into the mirror to smile hello. Now, in the big city, other creeps are invading Ellie’s consciousness. She becomes overwhelmed—and Wright’s film drags us into a repetitive cycle of Ellie seeing things that maybe aren’t actually there, to the concern and annoyance of those around her.
Metaphors abound. Last Night in Soho might be about the alluring danger of adolescent sexual awakening, or the terrible realization for far too many women that they are mere objects in the minds of far too many men. Or those lessons are rolled up into a bigger narrative of coming-of-age, in which Ellie learns that the present will have to do, and that only the future can, hopefully, be made better. All this comes in the packaging of frights and starts, which Wright stages in garish neon hues in the soundstage-looking streets of Soho.
Perhaps the film’s thematic intentions are noble. But its execution is glib, never finding the right balance between compassion and leering. The fact may be that the kind of grimy horror Wright is referencing, and aping, has little room for social-issue sincerity; that value could only be understood in retrospect, as subtext rather than actual text.
Or Wright’s film is just clumsy in its calibration. For one thing, it is hard to feel any connection to Ellie’s ardency for Sandy, because we barely spend any time in Sandy’s world before things go screwy. It renders all of Ellie’s obsession a little, well, irritating. We too often sympathize with the bewildered folks wearily asking Ellie what’s wrong.
Poor McKenzie tries very hard to sell all of this mounting madness, but she’s asked to play the same note over and over again, yielding rapidly diminishing returns. Taylor-Joy mostly has to slink and pout and be brutalized, the sorry lot of many an actor in horror films (and other films) past and present. Rigg at least got to have some fun before she went.
If only Wright had been less easily impressed by his visual creations and actually dug into the matter of the story, Last Night in Soho could have been something evocative and jolting. As is, his film (and it is decidedly his film in the end) tries patience and tips into tedium. Sitting in the theater, I found myself beginning to yearn for a lost time of my own: those precious, innocent hours before I’d sat down to watch the movie.
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