Last Night in Soho | Review
Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho was one of the films I’d been most excited to see all year and, much like its doe-eyed heroine Eloise “Ellie” Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) and her idea of London, I was left disappointed.
Ellie is an innocent girl living with her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) in the countryside who loves everything ‘60s, from the fashion to the music, and dreams of becoming a fashion designer. When she gets into the London College of Fashion, she believes her dreams are finally going to become reality. But there’s also one more thing about Ellie: she has visions of the dead.
Or she can see ghosts. The film never quite makes this clear.
Thomasin McKenzie as Eloise "Ellie" Turner
Her hopes and aspirations are quickly dashed after she moves to West End London, has an uncomfortable experience with her creepy cab driver, and meets her roommate from hell. Not wanting to deal with her roommate’s constant harassment, Ellie takes things into her own hands and rents a spare bedroom from a strict but motherly old woman named Miss Collins (the late Diana Rigg).
There, Ellie begins to have dreams of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer in the 1960s who represents everything Ellie aims to be: beautiful, confident, and fashionable. At times, (thanks to the film’s playful mirror tricks, Texas switches, dynamic camerawork, and inventive editing) Ellie even becomes Sandie in her dreams. And real life starts to mimic dream life as Ellie dyes her hair blonde, struts with more confidence, and uses Sandie’s wardrobe as inspiration for her fashion designs. But when Sandie’s relationship with her manager/lover Jack (Matt Smith) starts souring, Ellie’s dreams turn into a nightmare scenario, with her attempting to somehow save the woman in her dreams from a seemingly deadly fate that’s already happened decades earlier.
Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), and Jack (Matt Smith)
The premise of Last Night in Soho is intriguing, and there’s a lot to like in the film’s first half. Fans of Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) will find his signature elements still intact: the stylized scenes, the killer tunes, the skillful editing. But the second half almost lost me entirely because the story, written by Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917), doesn’t follow its own rules, doesn’t develop its characters enough to matter, and doesn’t seem to know what it wants to say.
There are hints Ellie inherited her sixth sense from her late mother who was mentally ill and died by suicide when she was just seven years old. Is Ellie delusional or are these visions real? The latter seems to be the most appropriate answer based on the film’s insistence, but the back half of the film betrays the rules of Ellie’s dreams that had been established earlier in order to provide a twist (one of three that I counted) that doesn’t so much impress as it does confuse.
Michael Ajao as John
My biggest gripe with Last Night in Soho is in its treatment of John, Ellie’s classmate and the film’s sole Black character, portrayed by Michael Ajao (Attack the Block).
I’m going to go on a slight tangent here to provide context as to why I found John’s depiction problematic. I used to believe films and television shows needed to be diverse, and often criticized productions that had all-white, or nearly all-white, casts. But I’ve since come to believe that, in some cases, diversity may be worse, because the writers and/or directors may not know how to treat marginalized characters with care. Do you really want Lena Dunham to write Black characters in Girls?
When John was first introduced in the film and I realized he was playing a larger part in the proceedings, a sense of dread started creeping in my body. Edgar Wright, as talented a director as he is, rarely includes any people of color in his films. His last film, Baby Driver, is his most diverse, and even then those characters only play minor supporting roles; they played archetypes. And Last Night in Soho is his first film to even star a woman! I wasn’t sure this film, directed by a white man, and co-written by two white writers, would do the character John justice. This being a psychological horror meant there was a good chance the character would be killed off, a well-worn trope for Black characters.
It’s highly likely the character was colorblind-casted, meaning the role was written without a particular race or ethnicity in mind, and that they simply casted “the best person for the role.” But this colorblind casting becomes detrimental when Ellie and John engage in consensual sex up until Ellie has another deadly vision. She throws John off of her, screams in agony, and he’s threatened with having the cops called on him. This important scene is very well-edited and shot. It gave me anxiety and panic. But the optics of a rape-like scenario with a Black man and a white woman, whose racial politics runs deep, is irresponsible. The fact that John was also in scary Halloween makeup (because the scene took place on Halloween night), and portrayed in a specific way due to the scene’s editing, made the entire thing even more disturbing. I was extremely uncomfortable. All of this could’ve been avoided had the character been white.
Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie)
Even if you can get past this issue, the film falls apart completely in its third act thanks to a confounding twist. It makes you question who exactly you’re supposed to root for. One minute, the film has Ellie trying to escape death, and then the next, it has her forgive the person who just tried to kill her. Huh?
This is a film that feels like what a man wrongly thinks feminism is about. A woman at the center? Check, in the form of two women co-leads. Toxic patriarchy? Check, in Ellie’s cab driver, Jack’s unmasking, and the countless men who want to have sex with Sandie. Girl Power? Check, in Ellie’s attempts to save Sandie from her demise.
Last Night in Soho may look and feel great—the neon glow and 1960s aesthetic from production designer Marcus Rowland (Rocketman) is shot gorgeously by Chung Chung-hoon (The Handmaiden & Me and Earl and the Dying Girl), the costume designs by Odile Dicks-Mireaux (Brooklyn) is fun, chic, and retro, and the editing by Paul Machliss (Baby Driver) keeps things moving at an efficient pace—but the film’s weak characterization, unwieldy plotting, and unsettling racial and gender politics (the film is also anti-sex work) ultimately drag it down into such a disappointing film you’ll wish you’d dreamt of a better movie.
