As a filmmaker, writer-director Edgar Wright is best known for stylish genre exercises that feature impeccable music cues. These are the hallmarks of all his breakout hits, such as the Cornetto trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Baby Driver. His filmography runs the gamut from zombies to video games, buddy cops to alien invaders. Wright’s latest film Last Night in Soho, which follow’s this year’s celebrated (and very grounded) documentary The Sparks Brothers, is an equally dazzling and loving pastiche with a killer soundtrack.
This time around, Wright sets his sights on Hitchcockian suspense (Rebecca and Vertigo, in particular) and the sordid thrills of Italian giallo films (like The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Blood and Black Lace and The Bird with Crystal Plumage). Thrown in, for good measure, is a high-concept twist worthy of The Twilight Zone. It’s a formula that works marvelously – during much of Last Night in Soho’s first half – until it suddenly doesn’t.
Thomasin McKenzie (who co-starred in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace) plays Eloise “Ellie” Turner, a talented young fashion designer reared in the English countryside. Early into Soho, Ellie decamps from a modern-day Cornwall, with aspirations and personal baggage (her mother committed suicide, years earlier) in tow, to study at the London College of Fashion. Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns present Ellie not as a country mouse lost in the big city, but a plucky young woman arriving at school with a well-defined aesthetic, one that yearns for the glamorous Swinging Sixties.
After a run-in with some mean girl classmates, Ellie decides to rent an off-campus, third-floor room with a landlady named Ms. Collins (the late, great Diana Rigg). There in bed she’s whisked away, nightly and perhaps at first only in dreams, to an extremely Mod nightclub in 1966, where she inhabits the persona of an up-and-coming lounge singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, of The Queen’s Gambit fame). Ellie’s experiences as a time-traveler in a seemingly idyllic past, a premise which parallels Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, quickly disabuse her of every doe-eyed prior she once held, and then some.
The past and present raise questions once they collide and become inseparable. Is the dashing romantic partner (Matt Smith) in ‘66 somehow connected to an older, shadowy figure (played by Terence Stamp) today? What’s the deal with Ms. Collins and her former lodgers? Why is Ellie so suspicious of her classmate, and potential romantic interest, John (Michael Ajao)? Can she really see ghosts? And what about that pivotal murder scene? Can her reflected visions be trusted? All these mysteries, and more, are eventually resolved with little satisfaction.
Last Night in Soho screeches off the rails as soon as Ellie and Sandie’s stories fully coalesce and then pivot to a temporal whodunit. What starts as a glorious interrogation, and celebration, of misplaced nostalgia transforms into a bargain basement, Ryan Murphy-style embarrassment. The precipitous plunge, from sparkling promise to utter mediocrity, is weirdly fascinating and briefly exhilarating. In the end, though, only a sense of total disappointment remains.
Photo courtesy of Focus Features
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