Last Night in Soho
Edgar Wright’s genre-flipping mystery-thriller blends nostalgia with horror to mixed results.
Persona non grata: Thomasin McKenzie
There is an irony here. The cerebral cortex of the British film industry is located in the heart of Soho, a closely-knit village teeming with back alleys, picturesque squares, Chinese restaurants, exclusive clubs, strip joints, celebrity stomping grounds, gay bars, student bedsits, exotic boutiques, basement cinemas, sex shops, historical curios and more subterranean sleaze than you can shake a stick at. And yet precious few British films take advantage of this colourful backlot on their doorstep. It is a treat then that the writer-director Edgar Wright has served up a double-helping of the place, setting his film both in the present and in the Swinging Sixties. Indeed, he lays on the nostalgia with a trowel, packing the soundtrack with songs from Petula Clark, Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield, lacing the screen with visual references to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the Criterion and Typhoo, and providing supporting turns from such Sixties icons as Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham and the late Diana Rigg. The wide-eyed beneficiary of all this is Ellie Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), an innocent from the West Country raised on Sixties’ pop by her Gran (Tushingham) along with recycled memories of her mother’s own misspent youth in the capital.
The young New Zealand actress McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Jojo Rabbit) is a natural ingénue and embodies the excitement and anticipation of her character with zeal. Obsessed with her mother – who committed suicide when she was just seven – Ellie dreams of becoming a fashion designer, channelling her passion for all things Biba and Mary Quant while studying at the London College of Fashion. Ridiculed by her female classmates, Ellie moves to a bedsit to be by herself, in an old house run by a matronly Ms Collins (Dame Diana Rigg). It is there that during a parallel night-time world, Ellie lets her hair down and encounters the seedier side of Soho in the Sixties: the same time her own mother worked as a fashion designer. And as she looks on, another young woman (Anya Taylor-Joy) takes centre stage, a brazen alter ego that is everything perhaps Ellie aspires to be…
Edgar Wright is a supreme stylist, but where he brought a new vitality to the action-thriller with Baby Driver (2017), he is on more uncertain ground with the incongruities of this psycho-mystery. As we, the audience, grapple with the ambiguities of Wright’s hell-ride, we can at least bask in the cinematic flourishes of his nostalgic head trip. The filmmaker wasn’t even around in the 1960s, so these are largely second-hand memories of a tight community riven with bad girls, wide boys and narrow streets. So Thunderball is showing at the Rialto, Cilla Black is still cool and the year is obviously 1965. But is Ellie unhinged like her mother was, haunted by an alter ego or trapped in a time warp? If one is content to follow the mystery as it unfolds, then there is much to admire in the side-lines, even if one remains baffled. But this is not the giddy express ride that Wright perhaps intended, as the improbabilities begin to outnumber the laughs and the scares. As an artist, Wright has excelled in the past at injecting the queasy into the comic (cf. Shaun of the Dead), but here it’s more flash than fright. A guilty pleasure, at best.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Rita Tushingham, Michael Ajao, Synnøve Karlsen, Pauline McLynn, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg, Jessie Mei Li, Margaret Nolan, Michael Jibson, Lisa McGrillis, Amieé Cassettari, Kassius Nelson, Rebecca Harrod, Alan Mahon, Elizabeth Berrington, Beth Singh, Terence Frisch, Al Roberts, Sam Claflin.
Dir Edgar Wright, Pro Nira Park, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Edgar Wright, Screenplay Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Ph Chung-hoon Chung, Pro Des Marcus Rowland, Ed Paul Machliss, Music Steven Price, Costumes Odile Dicks-Mireaux, Sound Ben Meechan and Jeremy Price, Dialect coaches Jill McCullough and Helen Simmons.
Film4 Productions/Perfect World Pictures/Working Title Films/Complete Fiction Pictures-Universal Pictures.
117 mins. UK. 2021. Rel: 29 October 2021. Cert. 18.
