Last Night in Soho is a neo-noir/horror/thriller kind of thing directed by Edgar Wright and starring Thomasin Mackenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Michael Ajao (who looked vaguely familiar to me and it wasn't until we'd finished the movie that Michelle told me he played one of the little kids in Attack the Block), Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg, Matt Smith, and Synnøve Karlsen.
Young Eloise Turner (Mackenzie) gets accepted to fashion school in London and leaves Cornwall for the first time. She's immediately overwhelmed by it all, and unfortunately winds up with an absolute cunt for a roommate (Karlsen), so moves out of her dorm and rents a room from a kindly old lady (Rigg) who's been here forever. Eloise ("Ellie") is also obsessed with the London of the 60s, and on her first night in this new place she dreams of a woman named Sandie (Taylor-Joy) trying to become a nightclub performer and meeting up with a fellow named Jack (Smith) who gets her an audition at a club.
Ellie starts incorporating Sandie's look into her designs and all is well for a second, and then the dreams get considerably darker. Jack pimps Sandie out and she gradually becomes bitter and angry. Ellie's roommate Jocasta is still a cunt. She doesn't fit in especially well, despite overtures from John, a very nice young man from South London (Ajao), and the dreams start intruding on her waking life. A mysterious older man (Stamp) seems to be following her. And then while hooking up with John, she sees Jack murder Sandie and freaks the entire fuck out (as you do), and from there the visions become full-on hallucinations. She starts trying to figure out what exactly happened to Sandie and gets some justice for her, but it doesn't go quite the way she thinks.
Spoilers for a movie that's four years old, on a blog that no one reads.
OK, so: Sandie is the kindly old lady that owns the house. She didn't die, she killed Jack, and then killed a bunch of johns and hid their bodies in the walls. She tries to kill Ellie and John (she knows that Ellie went to the cops and doesn't want the investigation to lead back to her; John just kinda gets in the way), but the house burns and Ellie and John escape. Presumably the bodies of her victims are discovered.
I'd meant to see this movie when it came out and then just didn't get around to it, and then heard kind of mixed things about it so never watched it. And then it was streaming on Peacock with ads, and fuck that, bring back Blockbuster. But anyway, it's actually really good. It doesn't have the same symmetry as other Wright films (the Cornetto Trilogy, Baby Driver), and it goes harder into classic gothic horror and noir than some of his other films. It's beautifully shot and lit, and the scenes where Ellie is Sandie's reflection for the first time and she's just experiencing all this glamour as a dream is probably my favorite sequence in the movie.
I also enjoy that, in true noir fashion, no one is clean. Sandie is a serial murderer, yes, and Jack probably deserved it. Did the rest of her victims? I mean, they might have been kind of scummy, but they probably didn't deserve to get brutally sliced up and stuffed into floorboards. Sandie sure thinks they deserved it, and Ellie acknowledges her feelings, but also doesn't seem to approve. At the same time, she refuses to avenge them when their spirits ask. I love that they (the ghosts) are still afraid of Sandie, too; I was really expecting them to rise up and attack her, but the most we get is Jack's ghost taking a swing at her, once.
Thomasin Mackenzie was only 18 when they made this movie and her wide-eyed innocence and ambition is perfect. She's a pretty singular character, but she's believable as someone with a very particular focus (London in the 60s) and she loses some of the romance of that focus, but never all of it (and at the end, when we see her show, she's still using those designs, indicating that she's accepted what's happened). Anya Taylor-Joy is really impressive as Sandie, who manages to command a room when she walks into it and doesn't get ground down by the city so much as die by inches despite herself.
I love ghost stories, I love noir, and I love Wright's films, so this is a nice intersection of those things. The soundtrack is pretty stellar, too.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch Value: Medium-high, maybe?
Next up: Nobody
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