LAST NIGHT IN SOHO
2021
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and Edgar Wright
Movies that exist principally to provide a feature-length package around a single sequence are about as old as movies, I guess—the reigning champion, that got a Best Picture Oscar out of it, is probably An American In Paris, inasmuch as the sequence it exists to package is a retelling of the narrative we already saw in dance—so Last Night In Soho is no special offender in this regard, nor is it even necessarily a bad thing. But movies like that sure do usually try harder to encase their short-feature purpose within some working regular-feature padding, and they also don't put that sequence in the first thirty minutes, and even if they don't always wind up with an altogether worthwhile experience, Soho is very special indeed in how blatantly visible its skeletal scaffold of a screenplay wound up, like figuring out the sequence took a year, and after they'd gotten it all sorted out they only had an afternoon to actually write the script that motivated it. If it gets by—I'm afraid I'm eventually going to decide it does—it's in part because its director and co-screenwriter (alongside Kristy Wilson-Cairns), Edgar Wright, is at least turning more scenes into capital-S "Sequences" than the script strictly demands, and in larger part because the most wrongheaded and tumorous part of the script, its ending, is so astoundingly off-the-rails of everything else the movie's trying to be and, especially, trying to say, that it rounds back towards a perverse brand of enjoyable.
I'm not going to be talking around any of that, but I should at least probably mention that the imagery I chose in the preceding paragraph—"oh, it's skeletal and it's tumorous, is it?"—is somehow not contradictory. It's both an extraordinarily bloated film and one that barely feels like the rudimentary sketch of what it wants to be (likewise, the plot it has is simultaneously highly inefficient and overcomplicated and, nonetheless, hardly manages to be any "plot" at all). What happens in the movie, anyway, is as follows: in furthest Cornwall, we have Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie; she prefers "Ellie"), who nurses dreams of becoming a fashion designer despite her rural handicap, and has just been offered the opportunity, accepted into the London College of Fashion, much to the excited delight of herself and her grandmother (Rita Tushingham), not least because this represents the fulfillment of Ellie's mother's dream, cut short by what we'll soon understand was suicide driven by mental illness, which we have significant reason to believe—for instance, Ellie's visions of her mother (Aimee Cassettari)—is something Ellie at least partly shares. Not making matters easier for Ellie is that her arrival at college is a disaster—a dollop of culture shock, magnified many times by the metropolitan bitches that are her classmates, particularly her roommate (Synnove Karlsen)—and unavoidably Ellie yearns for some escape from her reality, though first thing's first, finding new accommodations for herself at a bedsit in Soho run by one Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg). But now in her new home, heavy with history, Ellie's abiding obsession, with the swinging 60s, invades her slumber, offering her an even more tantalizing escape, in the form of an adventure back into a world sixty years gone, undertaken by another young woman who's just arrived in the city to take residence in this room at the top of the stairs, and with seemingly all the confidence and style that Ellie lacks, the glamorous Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Aiming to be a great singer, and soon armed with an influential boyfriend by the name of Jack (Matt Smith), Ellie is nothing short of exhilarated to ride along with Sandie, and she begins to live only for her dreams, even once they become, instead, the nightmare of a past that was never as pretty as she'd imagined it.
But right before that, we do have The Sequence, kicking off with the coruscating neon lights of the neighboring French bistro and the lightly surrealist sight of bedsheets expanding into an infinite tunnel that offers our heroine access to another existence in what is literally signposted as 1965—the year of Thunderball—and Taylor-Joy enters in her hot pink queen-of-the-60s dress to demand employment at this utterly happening nightclub whilst McKenzie, in nightclothes, is at once an insubstantial ghost but entwined and visually identified with Taylor-Joy, from the latter's first appearance in a floor-length mirror McKenzie's walked across, to the subsequent invisible shift where they've switched places and McKenzie watches "herself" from every other reflective surface in the place, to finally the joyous dance with Smith, where clever framing and whirligig camera direction permits Taylor-Joy and McKenzie to shift in and out of the frame almost seamlessly. Almost seamlessly because Wright's allowed a sufficient number of mistakes, which you scarcely even notice (and, to be perfectly honest, I didn't really), to assure you this is in-camera and real and really cool, and it absolutely is—even if I would suspect some of the sequence must still be compositing—as full of verve and color as Ellie's real life is absent of it, as exciting and sexy and alive as she needs her other life to be.
Anyhow, then Jack sexually enslaves Sandie.
So there we go, almost by the very next dream, that's basically a whole lot of the remainder of the movie right there, Jack turning out to be a cruel pimp, except for the shifts back into Ellie's real life, though (at some length) what we'll be dealing with is a murder mystery, of sorts (the term "of sorts" doing a downright unfair amount of work there), when at last Sandie's unwilling sex worker story ends with her murder at Jack's hands. Actually, not really, but let us not get ahead of ourselves. We've got an indecent amount of screenplay before we even get to maybe-a-murder-mystery. Until then, it's big fat globs of theme, which is a problem in the execution, if not really the problem underlying everything here.
So, on that count, Last Night In Soho is Wright's attempt at solving what I have to imagine is a personal problem, specifically a nostalgia for the 1960s that is not, to my knowledge, really all that widely-shared, or at least not by very many young people in the 2020s and not with the kind of naivete that requires fixing it with this kind of hammer. That is to say, what he wanted to make (and what his filmmaking is mostly interested in) is the appealing surfaces of the 1960s. But, because he has determined that the affection is misplaced—for it rests on laddish sexism at best (James Bond in Thunderball! in theaters now), and outright violence too often to ignore (hence, Thunderball)—what he decided he needed to make was this, which isn't even fun for long enough to fully tantalize you before the bottom falls out (roughly when Taylor-Joy's bottom falls out of her sexy-but-objectifying "puppet girl" chorine costume, a sequence costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux and others undoubtedly spent a lot of time and energy on, and which Wright will only look at out of the corner of his eye, because it's wrong), whereupon everything shifts into full-on miserablism all the time. And it's kind of interesting, I suppose, how transparently Wright would much rather be partaking in the objectification of the women, the styles, and the rhythms of the 1960s—complete with a heroine that would rather be partaking in it herself, so much so that she's wished herself back in time, and who, not to be too uncharitable, has the hallmarks of the dream girl one might invent in one's own imagination to share one's interest in those styles and rhythms—while spending a whole movie consummately denying the aesthetic impulses it exists to serve.
Problem is, it's not a very satisfying version of that denial, inasmuch as this is the kind of contradiction that contemporary mores don't absorb very well—the modern movie it most resembles, I think, is Sucker Punch—but, regardless, if Wright's approach is to resolve the contradiction immediately, he does at least find a way into some different 60s-inflected aesthetic impulses, mainly psychedelia, so as to properly dramatize Sandie's mental breakdown in the face of getting whored out by her boyfriend. (This being the tack the movie itself takes, and while no movie should be required to be everything, I'm not sure how unfair it would be to suggest it does not have a mildly reactionary attitude towards sex work.) Either way, it's embarrassingly overeager to assure you it "gets it," and trends tediously schematic in every possible element of its construction, feeling a need to tell you it does realize sexism still exists in the 2020s, by way of one remarkably outrageous cabbie, before it's even gotten around to telling you about sexism in the 1960s, thus siting its only positive intergender interactions in its one Designated Good Male (Michael Ajao), though, to ensure that aforementioned tediousness, it sites its meaningfully-positive infragender interactions pretty much nowhere. It doesn't even need the guy: he's barely a sidekick, so locked into his character's inhuman, one-dimensional function that he's hardly even allowed to do "plot" with Ellie, let alone have a personality beyond being blithely validating while his semi-girlfriend goes bugnuts insane, on the basis that he'd like to have sex with her for, apparently, no reason specific enough to actually make that a part of this story. (Though I suppose it is noticeable that McKenzie is styled to look hotter the crazier she gets. I don't think they're entirely nailing this "feminism" thing, and it won't be the last time.)
Then again, Ellie isn't really allowed to do plot with Ellie either. So if the foregoing is more merely annoying, it's the way it's been allowed to by-and-large replace a functional script that's the fundamental problem, while what hasn't been replaced still isn't functional, somehow being inefficient about being almost completely empty of either character or plot-directed incident. There's already the inherent challenge of a movie that's essentially two different movies that can't actually interface very much—Ellie's connection to Sandie is basically just "time-travelling voyeur"—but no decision was ever made about which one was more important, which means that it spends the larger part of its 116 minutes swinging back and forth trying to do a period drama about a girl with stars in her eyes that falls instantly into PSA territory (she should've recognized the good-hearted vice cop instantly, since he's her only prospective customer who isn't wholly repulsive) alongside a psychothriller about an unprepared, mentally-unwell young woman's awful first semester at college with very little to justify why these two movies are sharing the same space.
For the record, Sandie's movie is obviously "more important," to the extent that the sleek shocker version of this would probably only make Ellie an exigence-bordering-on-framing-device, but Wright and Wilson-Cairns are pretty resistant to that idea, no matter how obvious it is, even if "making an actual psychological drama about Ellie, which Sandie's story sometimes illustrates" plainly never interested them. Still, this is presumably why Ellie's movie has so much backstory, notably that dead mom who feels like a red herring (or even ultimate solution) they quickly dismissed, but forgot to actually remove—it's amazing how immaterial Ellie's mother is—though the most baffling is Ellie's whole Kingesque shine power, like this movie crucially depends on Ellie having preexisting psychic powers and can't simply be a Goddamn ghost story in a haunted walk-up (I mean, it's just "A Case of Eavesdropping"), or, if personalized explanation were required, can't just rest on Ellie's nuclear-powered nostalgia lifting the veil. Maybe it's here to justify Ellie's reputation for mental illness, something that doesn't follow her to college anyway (she's no nepo baby, she achieves her reputation all by herself), and which isn't any more narratively useful than "no preexisting mental illness." After all, seeing horrors every night and increasingly in the daytime would drive anybody nuts. Albeit probably not so nuts that they'd completely forget that you'd sound nuts, if you showed up to Scotland Yard to report a sixty year-old murder you witnessed in a nightmare, a ten-minute timesink which Wright and Wilson-Cairns have nevertheless decided to include in their movie.
This is, of course, overlooking that Last Night In Soho is never exactly fastidious about what rules govern Ellie's visions—they range from a holodeck presentation of the past that she's allowed to wander through freely, to being embodied in Sandie like a memory of a past life, to feints towards legitimate time travel where Ellie's able to affect the past—and if some of those things are doubtless suggestive of a more interesting plot than what we get, I do think the generous thing to do would be to agree that it's not the kind of movie that requires rigor. It still needs something, and it gets it eventually in the form of Ellie attempting to get justice for Sandie in her spare time (of which she has a fair amount—the film's understanding of "fashion college" appears to be founded on the belief that an entire semester is basically the same as a single episode of Project Runway—and when it loses interest in that, she gets a job that the plot still barely engages with). This is the murder mystery part and it's very, very bad and lazy. Now, Wilson-Cairns's only produced screenplay at this point was 1917, which is the sort of awesome movie that you could still probably convince somebody didn't have a screenplay; Wright's got no excuse, because while I don't think I'd declare Hot Fuzz any all-timer of a murder mystery, it functioned, at least. Last Night In Soho has had a problem the entire time, with its very limited capacity for writing characters who behave remotely human-like, but the added pressure of a mystery truly starts breaking it, managing exactly one (1) suspect (Terence Stamp), whose participation in the movie is, exclusively, glaring at Ellie like a rapist and reciting dialogue that virtually announces that he's a proud sex murderer, and at this point I had no preconceptions that just because he obviously couldn't be Jack (for "movie's-still-on" reasons, but even for a movie, it's hard to imagine Smith aging into Stamp) that meant this movie wasn't going to make him Jack anyway, but it's pretty astounding they want you to believe he's the good-hearted vice cop who probably could've told Ellie everything she needed to know if she hadn't chased him in front of a car and he wasn't a cryptic asshole. Well, with even that thin connection to some kind of real narrative machinery snapped, it just spins wheels with generic horror instead, taking recourse to some pretty tacky CGI ghosts representing all the faceless men who exploited Sandie.
Now, there's good to Last Night In Soho that makes this all easier to tolerate than it should be. It's fairly gorgeous, and if it expends it's best moves early—which it undeniably does—it's got back-up style to get it through, and DP Chung Chung-hoon is slathering everything with sheets of solid color lighting exploding out of darkness, while Wright and editor Paul Machliss are timing their sequences to the robust but-not-entirely-expected 60s soundtrack that Wright has naturally put together. Indeed, the entire production has ensured that this period recreation feels vital, however quickly-nauseating in its content, a three-dimensional and living corner of London that birthed itself into existence even if Wright's not sure it had any right to. Basically, no "Sandie" sequence is ever bad.
But then there's just the insane to Last Night In Soho, which I would hesitate to call either "good" or "bad," when the ending twists in such a way as to inform you you've been holding a venomous and very stupid snake to your chest this whole time. Maybe if I'd recognized Rigg (it was her final role), it would've been offensively obvious the entire time (I've seen that complaint, and it's a valid one), but I don't think the actual twist could've been obvious to anybody, for one thing how cheerfully it just chucks pretty much its entire thematic reason for being out the damn window. It would be pretty bullshit no matter what: Ellie's vision of Sandie's murder, it'll turn out, was a lie—the movie lying to us, albeit for no reason that justifies it having lied to Ellie—and Sandie has survived all these years, as the owner of this very walk-up, and that's nice, but guess what else? She is a serial killer of men—starting with Jack, which she enjoyed so much she kept on going—and these ghosts, including what I have to imagine would be a number of innocent sex work customers, but also including Jack (because the movie is frightfully unclear whether it's given even momentary thought to any of this), have been asking Ellie for help this whole time. Now Sandie knows Ellie knows, and we've got some pretty fearlessly batshit psycho-technics, to end our movie on some kind of distinctive note. Whether that note is "high" or "low" is almost immaterial: by the time it comes Last Night In Soho has been so dreary for so long that any break this wild, no matter how misjudged, at least jolts it back to life, which I'll take over being bored out of my skull.
Score: 5.01/10
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