Brimming with style, Last Night in Soho seduces with nostalgia for London’s past. Some viewers may find, however, that the attractive atmosphere doesn’t make up for the psychological thriller’s lacking plot.
Last Night in Soho begins with Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), a 1960s-obsessed aspiring designer living in the Cornish countryside, receiving her acceptance to fashion school in London. Her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) warns her that London can be a tough place and alludes to a certain “gift” of Ellie’s that might make the city all the more overwhelming. Nevertheless, Ellie packs her things (more old vinyl than anything else) and heads off to the big city. Disturbed by an uncomfortable interaction with a cabbie and bullied by catty girls in her dorm, she soon worries that her gran was right. Ellie decides to move into a studio apartment owned by an elderly woman, Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg). From her first night in her new bed, our fashion student’s gift, a sort of sensitivity to the energy and history of the past, becomes central to the film—she is transported back to ’60s Soho, sometimes watching and sometimes embodying (but never interacting with) the enthralling Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a spunky blonde hoping to be the next Cilla Black.
The first 45 minutes of this film prove that horror movies can be fun. The soundtrack of British pop and rock, the costume design, and the glitzy London scenes all powerfully conjure Ellie’s love for the 1960s and the city itself. Even the shots of contemporary London made me wistful for my own time exploring the streets of Soho while studying in the city just a few years ago. The opening act is well-paced, stylish, and engaging. We like these women! It’s exciting to watch quiet and introverted Ellie gain confidence and inspiration for her personal style and her design work by shadowing Sandie in the swinging sixties. And it’s equally exciting to watch an already confident Sandie go after her dream of stardom. Some of the scenes, like one in which Ellie and Sandie change places from shot to shot during a dance, are bewitching.
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This levity at the beginning of the film gives way to heavier themes as Sandie gets involved with a man named Jack (Matt Smith), who promises to make her dreams come true as both her boyfriend and her manager. He gets her an audition at a local club, which goes well. But Sandie’s dream is sullied when the gig ends up being in a burlesque performance whose dancers are meant to sleep with men from the audience after the show. We’re really banged over the head with images of female entertainers being degraded—a backstage sequence of women getting their drug fixes and performing oral sex with doors wide open. It’s a grim scene, and Sandie is visibly demoralized when it becomes clear that Jack has no problem with this arrangement or these working conditions. She ends up as a glorified prostitute, dancing in a bar until a man approaches her and asks for her name. Her response is never the same, but every man follows with the same eye-roll-inducing, “That’s a lovely name,” before taking her home. Her agency has been stripped, and in a way so has Ellie’s. She has no choice but to witness these dark happenings.
On Halloween, Ellie sees a vision of Jack murdering Sandie. This switch in tone isn’t a bad thing for the film; it was marketed as horror, after all. Unfortunately, it’s around this point that the plot begins to unravel. Wright clearly wants to show the bad that has to be accepted with nostalgic memories of decades past. But he’s telling us what most of us, women anyway, already know: women weren’t treated well sixty years ago. And with all of the flair he gives the flashback scenes, we come away enthralled by the sixties in London anyway. Other issues present themselves early on, but become harder to ignore as the story unfolds. Never in the film is it made clear whether Ellie is actually jumping into the past or just seeing ghosts in the present; this isn’t a problem until her dreamland begins bleeding into her waking life. Because of the ambiguity, we’re not sure how scared we’re meant to be when ghouls from Sandie’s dark history begin haunting Ellie during her waking life, and this makes us less sympathetic when encounters with the creepy faceless men repeatedly cause Ellie to panic and embarrass herself.
The team at the Bloody Good Horror podcast make a good observation: Last Night in Soho is clearly inspired by giallo films (notably Suspiria; with its vibrant, dreamy colors) but lacks the genre’s essential element of dangerous investigation. Ellie spends one scene in a library conducting research before she’s interrupted by the blurry-faced monsters and runs away without learning anything. Whereas the detective work in a good giallo is engrossing and entertaining, its absence from Last Night in Soho bogs the pace down and muddles the plot. After repeated encounters with grabby ghouls, Ellie abruptly decides, without evidence, that a local pub lurker she’s met is the aged Jack. She’s wrong, but when she learns this—only after the old man is hit by a car—the effect is less an exciting twist in the mystery than a sad distraction.
In the end, through no great detective work by Ellie, it is revealed that Ms. Collins is Sandie. Ellie’s vision was a metaphor: Sandie’s loss of spirit and self after months or years coerced into prostitution. The ghouls? Yes, they were the young Ms. Collins’ johns, but they were also her murder victims. Other critics turned on the film here, tired of stories depicting women becoming villains after suffering trauma. But I didn’t see Sandie as the villain until, feeling that Ellie threatened her secrets, she decided to kill her. What might have been a great “good for her” moment gets lost. There could have been a moment of profound connection between Ellie and Ms. Collins—Ellie attempts to create one, in fact, but Ms. Collins would rather burn to death to escape her past, both what has been done to her and what she herself has done.
Last Night in Soho is worth a watch for its style. But its ending is unclear. Are we meant to feel bad for Ms. Collins? Shocked and disgusted by her crimes? Are we supposed to love the sixties? Be wary of its dark side? Should we pity sex workers? How should we see their clients? Ultimately the messaging is going in too many directions and the result is that it’s too unnuanced for the film to round out. This is particularly disappointing from the director who gave us the sharp and witty societal commentary of Shaun of the Dead. Wright does a wonderful job of drawing us in, charming us with beautiful shots and an original idea, only to let it go to waste with a lackluster second half. The film will perhaps be best known as being Diana Rigg’s final work.