Score: 4.5 / 5
Ellie is stuck in the past. An aspiring fashion designer, she moves from Cornwall to London to study at the College of Fashion, but she can't quite fit in with her classmates or atrocious roommate Jocasta. Perhaps it's because she's poorer than they are and needs to pick up side jobs like working at a pub. Perhaps it's because her primary inspiration and obsession is music and habiliments of the Swinging Sixties. She's also fairly awkward around her peers, and tends to see her mother, a designer who killed herself many years before, in mirrors and windows. Rather than a scary ghost situation, this almost feels like a security blanket, letting Ellie feel connected to her heritage in a fast-moving, changing world. Too bad that heritage involves possible mental illness (mentioned briefly in the film's introduction as Ellie's psychic link to the emotional history of her environment) and suicide.
A little lost? Don't worry. At the start, it's a sort of whirlwind of color and sound and feelings, but that seems to be by intention, as director Edgar Wright is as concerned about music as about visuals. The soundtrack ceaselessly drops period bops that are mixed a little too loudly, forcing us into Ellie's headspace as she escapes the countryside and dives into a city awash with life. It's hard not to jive and strut along with her to the familiar hits, and a series of sharp edits amidst whirling camera shots moves everything along at a brisk pace. The film's frenetic opening scenes mellow out a bit in pace once Ellie leaves her uncomfortable dormitory in favor of a small studio flat near Soho, owned by an elderly, strict, but kind woman named Ms. Collins.
This is when the movie really gets into its narrative groove (as opposed to its stylistic groove, which Wright establishes immediately, much more efficiently and confidently than most directors), as Ellie begins to dream of Sandie. Sandie is a young blonde woman from 1966 who wants to be a swinging singer, doing whatever it takes to make a name for herself "downtown," as we learn when she sings that famed Petula Clark song for an audition. But Ellie's dreams of making it big in the city and her dreams of Sandie blur together a little too quickly, until reality and fantasy are indistinguishable to her and us. Sandie appears to have been a real person, and something terrible happened to her.
There is a lot of pleasure for audiences to eat up in this movie, but the primary one for me -- apart from constantly wondering what stylized sensations Wright would throw at us next -- was its lead performers. Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit, Old, Leave No Trace) never really captured my attention much before, and frankly she didn't much here as Ellie, but I really liked her placement in counterpoint to Sandie. Anya Taylor-Joy's Sandie is a confident, daring, slightly desperate character who seduces everyone around her, including her nightly interloper Ellie. The shyness and anxiety of Ellie slowly peel away as she turns her hair blonde to match Sandie's. We often see the two turn into each other through sleight of camera, deviously clever tricks of the trade that repeatedly left me unsure exactly who I was watching. The two inform each other more than themselves, and its a masterful pairing of skills. And then of course there are the endless pleasures of Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg, in her magnificent final filmed performance.
Edgar Wright appears to have made a love letter to a time and place, but then burns it and gleefully warms his hands in its fire. As if saying that blind nostalgia is dangerous, he dares us to feel good before forcing us to confront the problems of our pleasure. Sure, you could read the film in terms of gender dynamics and toxic men, much as in his previous film, Baby Driver, and that's a strong supertext here, but I think there's a little more going on. Why else would he spend so much time forcing us to gaze at women who gaze right back at us? Or, at least, who gaze at themselves in mirrors and windows more than we do. It takes some expert production design and practical and special effects, to be sure, not to mention brilliant cinematography, but I don't think these established filmmakers need to masturbate their egos in front of us anymore. They're doing it, I expect, to make the film a reflection on our expectations of the types of movies he's referencing. Which is to say, both that of the Bildungsroman of young women in big cities and that of the psychological thriller/slasher made popular by people like Hitchcock and De Palma and Polanski.
Of course, the latter genre has lately been championed by other writers and filmmakers, especially in Gillian Flynn's body of work. But before women and feminists took over, the genre belonged solely to wealthy white men, and it's hard to separate this movie from those stylistically or in terms of content. It's a fertile feeding ground for scholarship, and I'm sure lots of good writing will come from Last Night in Soho. Less fertile, arguably, is the central plot of the film, which is largely predictable until its final nasty twist. For the most part, the film's villain (Matt Smith of Official Secrets, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Mapplethorpe) is less fearsome than hateful; more frightening are the ghosts Ellie increasingly sees, all of whom seem to be after her. It's an odd way to "do ghosts", but they are more like set dressing, kind of like in Crimson Peak. This is a deeply Gothic story, one that hinges on humans (specifically a young woman) grappling with past wrongs done in a house haunted by wicked men.
I can hardly wait to jump into this wild ride again. After all, "The light's so much brighter there. You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares."
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