Last Night in Soho (2021)

Edgar Wright’s latest feature is his first attempt at a horror film, and boy did it have me pretty excited. It seemed to promise it all: the sixties, "psychological horror,” Anna-Taylor Joy, and the filmmaker behind such classics as Shaun of the Dead? Surely, this was going to be something special, and in many ways it is. But the first thing you should know is that this is not exactly a traditional genre film. It’s got a little of this, a little of that; a little horror, a little comedy, a little coming-of-age drama, and plenty of supernatural sleuthing, and the result is pure Wright, even if his reach often exceeds his grasp.

The premise is bizarre. When young Eloise moves to London to go to one of the country's top art schools, she finds herself coming undone from a mixture of loneliness, stress, the ability to see dead people, oh and an alpha bitch roommate who seeks to make her life hell out of jealousy. Her solution? Off-campus housing! How eerily reminiscent of the protagonist of the last film we looked at, Ti West's The House of the Devil...

Anywho, finding someplace she can afford isn’t easy, so when she comes across an ad for a cozy little room owned by the elderly Ms. Collins, she doesn’t waste any time answering. Before you know it, she’s picked up a job at the local pub, and her instructors at school have become smitten with her work. Well, that and she has the attention of another new student, John, who she quickly becomes quite friendly with. Yes, everything seems to be going just peachy… 

There's just one tiiiny little niggle: each night when Eloise lies down to sleep, she's transported somehow to Soho in the sixties, where she follows the tracks of the up-and-coming Sandy, a young girl looking to become a famous singer. Every single night this happens, with a more complete picture of the girl emerging each time Eloise goes back. At first, this is a like dream come true for her, but as Sandy is used and abused by all the greasy men around her, Eloise begins to realize that The Past Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be™ and that however Sandy’s story ends, it’s probably not going to be pretty.

The good old days (When times were bad)

Early on in the film, when there’s no one element to focus on, time flies as the story continues to snowball vaguely toward becoming the horror film promised in the marketing materials. Eloise’s first trip to the sixties is a memorable bit, when the audience still doesn’t know what to expect going forward, and things haven’t yet settled into any kind of pattern. We don’t yet know why Eloise is privy to what she’s seeing and we don’t understand her relationship, if there is any, to the woman she’s essentially walking in the shoes of, meaning we’re instantly hooked. The issue with Last Night in Soho is that this sense that anything could happen doesn’t last long before things begin to take shape and it becomes all too clear what we've really been in for all along: a solid, if convoluted mystery story that terminates in an equally solid, if convoluted ending.

If you didn’t catch my sarcasm earlier, Edgar Wright has something he wants to share with the world with this film, and that’s his conviction that You Shouldn't Romanticize The Past™. Just because you enjoy the music, movies, bad television, or fashion from any given era doesn’t mean that the era in question was all that much fun to live through. Wright obviously thought so much of this observation that he made it the core of this entire narrative, which is just kind of mystifying. People in politics and social justice have been banging this drum for decades, yet Wright apparently thinks so little of his audience that he feels it bears repeating. For my part, I know that humans have been just as fucked up as they are now since the beginning of time, thanks. 

This doesn’t exactly cause any issue with the film (a horror film’s message doesn’t have to be subtle, or even all that original,) but once you get to the stuff dealing with the misogyny of the period, it’s a whole different story. For example, at the end of the film, the character who ends up being revealed as a murderer tells us all the men she’s murdered in cold blood deserved it, and Eloise, a mousey young girl, essentially tells her she’s absolutely right. Needless to say, Wright's convictions often get in the way of the fairly traditional whodunnit he’s trying to spin for us and throw off what should have been an exciting, action-packed ending where our heroine fights off her attacker and emerges triumphant. But here, her attacker is apparently in the right in addition to being a murderer, so the film just doesn’t know what the hell to do with its big explosive climax.

Two wrongs don't make a Wright

This is made all the worse by the script’s reliance on telling, not showing. We even get one whole scene of Eloise going over everything she knows about the case out loud to herself in a last-ditch effort to catch the sleeping audience up to speed and set them up for a twist. The only thing is, come the end of the film, it ends up not mattering one single bit to the actual big twist the entire narrative is leading up to, so what the hell was the point? For such a complex story, maybe some of the junk around the edges of the narrative could have stood a bit of trimming.

Besides that, the film’s other biggest weakness is that it’s just too damn busy and kinetic. I know this is Wright’s style, but shocker: it doesn’t work well for horror. That isn’t exactly a killer, because most of this film doesn’t feel so much like a horror movie as a mystery film starring a young plucky detective; but once that aspect does kicks in at the end just as suddenly as it disappears, things threaten to come across as pastiche. Some creative images and visual devices end up making the weaker stuff worth it (especially the brief ‘showdown’ at the end,) but I can’t help but feel that this film could have been so much better if it'd had a little more room to let things breathe. Compounding these issues is a love of expensive-looking but entirely unconvincing computer-generated effects.

So where am I at with this rambling review? Well, I gotta tell ya: I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I would have enjoyed a subtler film that didn’t feel like it was constantly overexplaining itself, not to mention one that dared to take Wright’s signature style to a more restrained, low-key place, but in the end, this is what we’ve got. The filmmakers should be congratulated on the technical achievements of the film, from the costuming, to the hair and makeup, cinematography, and pitch-perfect performances from a number of wonderful actors and actresses (RIP Diana Rigg.) But Edgar Wright, my man, if you’re listening: maybe don’t keep writing all your own scripts? Give Simon Pegg another call; anything.