After three posts where I struggled to even find anything resembling an interesting angle to write about, I conclude my Shocktober with a movie that overwhelmed me with too many options. Not one to lightly repeat himself, Edgar Wright’s return to the horror genre after Shaun of the Dead was highly anticipated, especially after a pandemic delay. Last Night in Soho was hyped up as a proper spooky story, without the comedy elements Wright was known for, as well as his first film with women as main characters instead of just love interests. Was that too much of a departure for him to handle? Yeah dude.
A mentally unstable aspiring designer named Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) moves from rural South West England to study at the London College of Fashion. Ellie’s haunted by her mother, who committed suicide when Ellie was a child and now silently appears to her in mirrors. That sounds interesting but don’t worry, we won’t learn anything more about that at all. Her grandmother Peggy (Rita Tushingham) knows about this situation but seems cool with it, merely cautioning Ellie to be safe in the big city. Unfortunately, what Peggy didn’t warn Ellie about was how hard it would be for her to fit in with her big city classmates – especially her new roommate, Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen), who immediately starts bullying her. So Ellie decides to ditch the dorms and rent a room, quickly moving into the spare bedroom of the elderly Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg, in her final role). But, man, this room is crazy!
The first night Ellie sleeps in her new bed, she awakens in the Swinging Sixties as Sandie, an aspiring singer played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who I feel like is also sometimes an aspiring singer… maybe? She does her own singing in this. Sandie bursts onto the scene: eminently confident in her abilities, she goes straight to Café de Paris and demands that the owner hire her. Instead, she’s directed toward Jack (Matt Smith), who immediately waves a bunch of red flags for us viewers but promises her the world and sweeps her off her feet. The next morning, Ellie awakens revitalized and starts turning her experience as Sandie into inspiration for designs at school, garnering her much praise. But, instead of blossoming and developing a life of her own, Ellie rushes home every night to experience more of Sandie’s story. And as things begin to go sideways for Sandie, it starts to take a very real toll on Ellie too.
Before I get down on him: Edgar Wright is a wonderful filmmaker. That’s a big reason why his collaborations with Simon Pegg were so successful; the genre knowledge and technical skill Wright brings as a director elevated those projects so far beyond mere parody comedies that I think it’s fair to say he himself became an influence on everything that came after, from Key & Peele to the recent Naked Gun reboot. I don’t think anyone could argue anything but Last Night in Soho was shot and edited at the highest level. And his dedication to packing his movies with infinite needle drops, which you’d have thought hit it’s apex in Baby Driver, actually peaks here. There must be like 50 damn songs in Last Night in Soho. It’s the kind of movie that makes you wonder how they made it, and the answers are actually really cool. It’s just too bad that the script is… at best derivative and at worst downright problematic.
So Edgar Wright has a problem with writing and that problem is women. Most of his movies are about lonely men and their bros and women are kind of just prizes for them to win at the end. It’s a big enough problem with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World that the comic’s creator had go and make a Netflix anime to course correct Wright’s ending (which differed from the comic’s). So I guess I laud Wright’s effort to try to stretch out of his comfort zone and make a movie about women. He even teamed up with a woman to write this, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, although I’m not sure if that really helped since she also mostly just writes men (her other credits: 1917 and Penny Dreadful). Despite their best intentions, somehow the two of them settled on surprisingly bland dialogue and a (visually striking) profoundly muddled climax. I see what they were going for but that ending got a big oof from me.
To put it in harsh, 2025 terms: Last Night in Soho is like if Promising Young Woman were written by a performative male.
Glad I could inform you just prior to writing this.
Hahaha