Last Night in SohoPeople have a tendency to romanticize the past, but no one remembers all of the horrible things that accompanied it because they haven't had to experience it firsthand. Last Night in Soho is a psycho-thriller about a young woman named Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) who dreams of making it big as a fashion designer and fills her days with the music of the 1960s, courtesy of record given to her by her grandmother, Peggy (Rita Tushingham). Disillusioned by petulant dormmates, she moves into an apartment owned by a Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg), only to discover that she starts having incredibly vivid dreams about becoming an aspiring singer in the Sixties named "Sandie" (Anya Taylor-Joy).
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Directed and co-written by Edgar Wright (along with Krysty Wilson-Cairns), Last Night in Soho essentially fetishizes the London of the 1960s, especially with regard to its music. Eloise, a.k.a. "Ellie" is over the moon when she listens to her grandmother's LPs, dancing in her homemade newspaper dress during the film's opening, pointing to posters on her wall of recognizable British pop songs and albums, and so on. And while that music was phenomenal, true, there seems to be little substantial ground for exactly why she fancies it so intensely. The audience is stuck trying to connect these dots that were only barely there in the first place. In the first few minutes, it is revealed that Ellie sees the ghost of her mother (Aimeé Cassettari) in the mirror, who is smiling softly at her. Ellie's mother apparently killed herself, and her father is nowhere to be seen (it's a little unclear if he's dead, too, or if he just ran off, or what). So Ellie has grieved, although her mother apparently committed suicide upwards of ten years prior, so Peggy has truly raised Ellie in her stead. So it makes sense that Ellie would be close to Peggy and model some aspects of her life after hers, like her taste in music. But after Ellie moves to London, every conversation with Peggy essentially has Ellie lying about the suffering she's experiencing in London; it seems more like she is avoiding Peggy, not out of some level of dislike but out of a fear of revealing that suffering. So just how close are they really? And all of this has the unfortunate effect of making Ellie's fixation on Sixties music--which she listens to alternately on a turntable and via her fancy Beats bluetooth headphones--little more than an affectation. In a way, this should suggest that Ellie is a bit...off, but she isn't presented as a loon or someone who is truly crazy. No, she is depicted as a quiet, sensitive girl who is excited to be able to realize her dream of designing fashion in London. But from the start, her stay in London is riddled with uncomfortable moments--from a cabbie who makes suggestive comments to her to a conceited, insecure would-be dormmate calling herself "Jocasta" (Synnøve Karlsen), sans last name. Aside from one token nice guy named John (Michael Ajao) who awkwardly tries to befriend Ellie, almost everyone in the city seems like a threat. If we believe that Ellie's experiences in Last Night in Soho are representative of her perception of reality rather than reality itself, this suggests that--despite being a quiet, sensitive young woman--that Ellie might actually be crazy. To that end, the movie draws clear inspiration from another psycho-thriller from the Sixties, Roman Polanski's Repulsion. In fact, both movies have much in common. Ellie becomes obsessed with the dreamlife she experiences in her apartment and devotes an increasingly amount of time to it, while Carol (from Repulsion) spends more and more time in hers out of a fear of the outside world. As Last Night in Soho progresses, Ellie begins seeing phantoms of assorted men that have sexual designs on Sandie--who Ellie identifies more and more with through her dreams--and rightfully feels threatened by these ghost men. Similarly, Carol (a virgin, like Ellie) envisions men's hands grasping at her through the walls as she resists their touches, wearing little more than a negligee. (Carol's hallucinations are implied to be a result of repressed sexuality.) So this movie toys with the idea that Ellie might be crazy because she does see the ghost of her mother, but believing this means that Ellie becomes a character whose view of reality is untrustworthy. And this makes the conclusion of the film all the more inconsistent and unsatisfying.
Before I continue, I should mention that I will be "spoiling" the ending of Last Night in Soho here, so fair warning. After the meandering first half of an hour of the movie, and after Ellie moves into Ms. Collins's apartment, she sees herself as Sandie--a sexy starlet who has aspirations of being a chanteuse--in her dreams. Sandie attracts the attention of a manager named Jack (Matthew Smith), a suave and stylish fella who helps her get an audition at The Rialto and becomes her lover. Everything seems hunky dory and Ellie draws inspiration from Sandie's alluring outfits for her schoolwork and even dyes her hair blonde to match the singer's. But as those dreams continue, Ellie experiences Jack manipulating Sandie into becoming a prostitute, doing her business out of the same room where Ellie lives. And during one fateful dream on Halloween, she "appears" to see Sandie stabbed to death by Jack, and believes that a silver-haired gentleman (Terence Stamp) who visits The Toucan--a pub where Ellie works to pay for her expensive vintage clothing--and who casts an occasional sly wink at Eloise, is none other than Jack himself. And to top it off, Ellie is assailed by ghastly apparitions who are misshapen shadows of the men who took advantage of Sandie half a century ago, yet she never stops to consider why she is haunted thus. And, of course, the movie prefers to withhold this information from the audience until the last minute, so everything up until then suggests that these ghostly "Johns" are out to destroy Ellie. So Ellie becomes increasingly paranoid, and it shows to her teachers and classmates. She even tries to confront the "silver-haired gentleman" and entrap him into a confession. Only...he isn't Jack. Sure, the movie teases that they might be by way of their similar mannerisms, but oh wait! Did you miss that one overly obvious clue when Sandie was meeting with clients who ask her name, and one of them is suggested to be a cop? Well...that's who the "silver-haired gentleman" is revealed to be--an ex-vice cop named Lindsey (not Jack), who is also a blatantly obvious red herring. And of course he is killed just moments before Ellie's manager at the pub reveals this crucial detail to her...because of course Ellie wouldn't have just asked his name at any point. (Ugh.) At her wit's end, she decides to leave London entirely and tells Ms. Collins about this...who turns out to be named "Alexandria Collins", which is "Sandie's" full name, apparently. So...Sandie is clearly alive; so what of Jack? Well...it seems that it was Sandie who killed Jack, and not the other way around, and Sandie went and killed all of her former clients for sleeping with her for money in retaliation. Uh-huh. So Ellie, who up to this point has been experiencing everything from the eyes of Sandie in these dreams just all of a sudden confuses getting stabbed a hundred times with stabbing someone else? (Yeah, I'm not buying it, either.) It's one thing for the ending of Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie to have Tippi Hedren forget who killed who because she was a traumatized witness; it's another when Ellie essentially is Sandie, and the camera is dubiously trying to obfuscate that detail solely for the sake of a climactic twist. And the spooky ghosts are still spooky, but look a little sadder after this is known, asking Ellie for help instead of chasing her everywhere. And yet they still grab at her from the floor boards where Alexandra/Sandie buried them...somehow managing to successfully mask the smell all these years. (Perhaps with all of that garlic from the French restaurant they live next to. Does French cuisine really use that much garlic?!) And perhaps the strangest thing of all is Ellie's response to Ms. Collins after she reveals herself to be a serial killer,who also just poisoned Ellie with tea: she says that she understands why she killed all of those men, because they "used" her. Yeah...she's not horrified at mass murder, because sympathy for an exploited sex worker comes first. Uh-huh.
It's clear that Last Night in Soho began as a high concept psycho-thriller--girl dreams she's someone else in the Sixties, and gets swept up in the mystery of her own murder--but this movie definitely lost the horizon somewhere. It's fixated on filling nearly every scene with its admittedly killer soundtrack, but these all too often feel crammed into scenes solely to justify Ellie's own arbitrary obsession with it in the first place. Heck, even the title of the movie comes from a song by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, and reportedly stemmed from a comment made by Quentin Tarantino that "Last Night in Soho" is the "best title for a movie that's never been made"...until now. In fact, Last Night in Soho feels like a pale imitation of another work by Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, which more successfully immerses its audience into the late Sixties and naturally incorporates music of the era into each scene, as opposed to this movie where it feels inorganic and contrived. There's also not a lot to Ellie as a character, aside from liking fashion and her late mother's ghost haunting her. In fact, when she goes to school, the only designs she brings with her are those she saw Sandie wearing in her dreams. Is this meant to say that she has no original ideas of her own? Ms. Collins makes an intriguing comment midway through the film about how in London, someone has died in every room. At its best moments, Last Night in Soho teases the idea of London being an ancient city being replete with ghosts--a haunted metropolis. (Is it merely a coincidence that Jack shares his name with the infamous "Jack the Ripper"?) But instead of exploring this in a meaningful way, the ending turns all of these ghosts into just being terrible men who essentially "got what was coming to them" for exploiting a young woman and corrupting her. (A ghost story for the #MeToo era.) It's hard to truly dislike Ellie, though, largely because she is so inoffensive. She is an altogether nice young woman, if a bit lacking in powers of deduction. Last Night in Soho isn't really a mystery, but a series of unfortunate events which keeps happening to the hapless girl. Subsequently, there's no real sense of agency to her actions, and everything she does try to do to solve the murder is either ineffectual or outright blows up in her face. So this means that the needs of the story dictates the plot and not the protagonist, which is kind of dull. Ultimately, like the pink and breezy, flowing outfit Ellie plagiarizes from her dream visions of Sandie, Last Night in Soho turns out to be little more than a pretty show that lacks any real substance or depth.
Recommended for: Fans of Sixties era British pop music and subpar psycho-thrillers unceremoniously smashed together. Last Night in Soho starts out as fairly tame fare, but it progresses into scenes of intense violence and gore--sometimes of a sexual nature--a tonal inconsistency that feels like a "bait and switch".
Before I continue, I should mention that I will be "spoiling" the ending of Last Night in Soho here, so fair warning. After the meandering first half of an hour of the movie, and after Ellie moves into Ms. Collins's apartment, she sees herself as Sandie--a sexy starlet who has aspirations of being a chanteuse--in her dreams. Sandie attracts the attention of a manager named Jack (Matthew Smith), a suave and stylish fella who helps her get an audition at The Rialto and becomes her lover. Everything seems hunky dory and Ellie draws inspiration from Sandie's alluring outfits for her schoolwork and even dyes her hair blonde to match the singer's. But as those dreams continue, Ellie experiences Jack manipulating Sandie into becoming a prostitute, doing her business out of the same room where Ellie lives. And during one fateful dream on Halloween, she "appears" to see Sandie stabbed to death by Jack, and believes that a silver-haired gentleman (Terence Stamp) who visits The Toucan--a pub where Ellie works to pay for her expensive vintage clothing--and who casts an occasional sly wink at Eloise, is none other than Jack himself. And to top it off, Ellie is assailed by ghastly apparitions who are misshapen shadows of the men who took advantage of Sandie half a century ago, yet she never stops to consider why she is haunted thus. And, of course, the movie prefers to withhold this information from the audience until the last minute, so everything up until then suggests that these ghostly "Johns" are out to destroy Ellie. So Ellie becomes increasingly paranoid, and it shows to her teachers and classmates. She even tries to confront the "silver-haired gentleman" and entrap him into a confession. Only...he isn't Jack. Sure, the movie teases that they might be by way of their similar mannerisms, but oh wait! Did you miss that one overly obvious clue when Sandie was meeting with clients who ask her name, and one of them is suggested to be a cop? Well...that's who the "silver-haired gentleman" is revealed to be--an ex-vice cop named Lindsey (not Jack), who is also a blatantly obvious red herring. And of course he is killed just moments before Ellie's manager at the pub reveals this crucial detail to her...because of course Ellie wouldn't have just asked his name at any point. (Ugh.) At her wit's end, she decides to leave London entirely and tells Ms. Collins about this...who turns out to be named "Alexandria Collins", which is "Sandie's" full name, apparently. So...Sandie is clearly alive; so what of Jack? Well...it seems that it was Sandie who killed Jack, and not the other way around, and Sandie went and killed all of her former clients for sleeping with her for money in retaliation. Uh-huh. So Ellie, who up to this point has been experiencing everything from the eyes of Sandie in these dreams just all of a sudden confuses getting stabbed a hundred times with stabbing someone else? (Yeah, I'm not buying it, either.) It's one thing for the ending of Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie to have Tippi Hedren forget who killed who because she was a traumatized witness; it's another when Ellie essentially is Sandie, and the camera is dubiously trying to obfuscate that detail solely for the sake of a climactic twist. And the spooky ghosts are still spooky, but look a little sadder after this is known, asking Ellie for help instead of chasing her everywhere. And yet they still grab at her from the floor boards where Alexandra/Sandie buried them...somehow managing to successfully mask the smell all these years. (Perhaps with all of that garlic from the French restaurant they live next to. Does French cuisine really use that much garlic?!) And perhaps the strangest thing of all is Ellie's response to Ms. Collins after she reveals herself to be a serial killer,who also just poisoned Ellie with tea: she says that she understands why she killed all of those men, because they "used" her. Yeah...she's not horrified at mass murder, because sympathy for an exploited sex worker comes first. Uh-huh.
It's clear that Last Night in Soho began as a high concept psycho-thriller--girl dreams she's someone else in the Sixties, and gets swept up in the mystery of her own murder--but this movie definitely lost the horizon somewhere. It's fixated on filling nearly every scene with its admittedly killer soundtrack, but these all too often feel crammed into scenes solely to justify Ellie's own arbitrary obsession with it in the first place. Heck, even the title of the movie comes from a song by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, and reportedly stemmed from a comment made by Quentin Tarantino that "Last Night in Soho" is the "best title for a movie that's never been made"...until now. In fact, Last Night in Soho feels like a pale imitation of another work by Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, which more successfully immerses its audience into the late Sixties and naturally incorporates music of the era into each scene, as opposed to this movie where it feels inorganic and contrived. There's also not a lot to Ellie as a character, aside from liking fashion and her late mother's ghost haunting her. In fact, when she goes to school, the only designs she brings with her are those she saw Sandie wearing in her dreams. Is this meant to say that she has no original ideas of her own? Ms. Collins makes an intriguing comment midway through the film about how in London, someone has died in every room. At its best moments, Last Night in Soho teases the idea of London being an ancient city being replete with ghosts--a haunted metropolis. (Is it merely a coincidence that Jack shares his name with the infamous "Jack the Ripper"?) But instead of exploring this in a meaningful way, the ending turns all of these ghosts into just being terrible men who essentially "got what was coming to them" for exploiting a young woman and corrupting her. (A ghost story for the #MeToo era.) It's hard to truly dislike Ellie, though, largely because she is so inoffensive. She is an altogether nice young woman, if a bit lacking in powers of deduction. Last Night in Soho isn't really a mystery, but a series of unfortunate events which keeps happening to the hapless girl. Subsequently, there's no real sense of agency to her actions, and everything she does try to do to solve the murder is either ineffectual or outright blows up in her face. So this means that the needs of the story dictates the plot and not the protagonist, which is kind of dull. Ultimately, like the pink and breezy, flowing outfit Ellie plagiarizes from her dream visions of Sandie, Last Night in Soho turns out to be little more than a pretty show that lacks any real substance or depth.
Recommended for: Fans of Sixties era British pop music and subpar psycho-thrillers unceremoniously smashed together. Last Night in Soho starts out as fairly tame fare, but it progresses into scenes of intense violence and gore--sometimes of a sexual nature--a tonal inconsistency that feels like a "bait and switch".