Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho (2021) is a strangely impressive horror picture. The film has good actors, excellent camerawork and production values, and an intriguing premise. It's too ambitious, perhaps, striving to exceed the limitations of its humble genre in a slightly unseemly way -- but this is consistent with its good cast and clever writing. You don't want to waste some excellent plot twists and some fine acting on something run-of-the-mill and so there's a bit too much movie here -- the film runs about twenty minutes too long and everything in the picture occurs about three times, attenuating the suspense and thrills. Nonetheless the picture is successful, memorable, and very cleverly exploits two aspects of slippage or ambiguity, turning what might be genre defects into plot points with symbolic significance. First, the movie plays on the notion that all wide-eyed ingenues look alike -- it's hard to distinguish between the two baby-faced debutants in the movie and the picture makes use of this confusion in a clever way. (The idea of the disposable or fungible scream-queen is here in play.) Second, the movie makes good use of the fact that as people age, they cease to look like themselves -- something that is particularly prevalent in the movie industry where image is everything. Age, ultimately, is a sort of horror-show in this picture. The film involves a young contemporary girl caught in fantasies of London's swinging sixties -- and, so, Wright casts actors, now elderly, who were iconic in that era: Rita Tushingham famous for her role in 1961's A Taste of Honey, Terence Stamp (The Collector 1965), and Diana Rigg, famous for many reasons but not the least for her performances as latex and leather-clad Emma Peel in 51 episodes of the The Avengers in the mid-sixties. (Last Night in Soho is dedicated to Diana Rigg and was her last performance.) This high-powered acting contributes to the film's overall effect and, further, provides a living link as it were to Carnaby Street and the sixties. In short, the movie is quite a bit better than it should be and represents a considerable advance in Edgar Wright's body of work.
A wide-eyed naif, Ellie, travels from provincial Cornwall to London. Ellie is enamoured with the style, music, and fashions of the sixties -- perhaps, because her deceased mother wished to become a fashion designer in London. (Ellie's mother was schizophrenic and committed suicide, overcome by the dazzle and corruption of the big city.) Enrolled in school for fashion designers, Ellie is bullied by a clique of mean girls, one of whom who predicts that "she will slit her throat by Christmas". An outsider at her school, Ellie can't get along with her dorm-mates, all of them casually depraved, and, so, she rents a room in the home of an elderly woman played by Diana Rigg. The room is bathed in white light in the day but full of hot pink flashing neon from signs outside at night. In her dreams, the lonely and homesick Ellie imagines herself as an elegant glamor girl, someone named Alexandra. Alexandra, also new to the city, is living in London at the time of the debut of Thunderball, the Sean Connery James Bond vehicle released in 1965. She meets a handsome young man who squires her around the Soho night clubs and cabarets. The young man is a bit sinister but the naive girl imagines him as sophisticated, kind, and gallant. The boy kisses her and, when Ellie awakes from her dream, she bears the mark of his kiss, a hickey, on her neck. More erotic dreams follow, somehow induced by the room where she sleeps. The gallant young man turns out to be a vicious pimp and, soon, she is working as a prostitute. These dream sequences are lavishly filmed, channeling the energy and verve of the swinging sixties in brilliant technicolor images -- of course, the soundtrack is vibrant with sixties pop music, including, notably, Petulia Clark's anthem "Downtown." In these sequences, Ellie appears as a double to Alexandra -- when Alexandra looks in the mirror, she sees Ellie; similarly, in waking life, Ellie sees Alexandra when she gazes in the mirror. It seems clear that Ellie is losing her grip on reality. Her dreams become increasingly vivid and awful --she sees herself sleeping with a legion of faceless men -- this is literal: Wright blurs the men's faces so that the look like they awful specters that we see fighting or vomiting or having sex in Francis Bacon's paintings. When Ellie brings a suitor home to her room, she has visions of Alexandra being slashed to death in her bloody bed and her would-be sexual encounter ends horribly. (The young man, helpful and kind, feels like cannon-fodder -- the poor bastard that the crazy girl murders thinking that he is raping her. Plot points of this kind refer directly to Roman Polanski's horror picture Repulsion, constructed around a similar narrative.) Increasingly, disoriented Ellie thinks that Alexandra, whom she now views as separate from her and not a Doppelgaenger, was an abused prostitute murdered in the bedroom where she sleeps. By this time, Ellie is working at a pub and is harassed there by a seedy older man (Terence Stamp). Ellie begins to suspect that the old gent is the vicious pimp who killed Alexandra. She informs the police and begins researching crimes in the sixties in Soho, hundreds, it seems, including about a dozen Johns who went missing in the area. She begins to threaten others at school and her mental state deteriorates -- dozens of disfigured-looking men, grey shadows that lurk all around, are stalking her. At this point, there are two very clever plot twists that it would be unfair to reveal -- suffice it so say that these surprises are brilliantly engineered: the viewer doesn't see them coming, but once disclosed, these twists make perfect sense and, indeed, might have even been surmised in advance if the viewer were properly attentive to all the clues embedded in the story. The film ends with a spectacular sequence: a Wagnerian homage to Brian de Palma channeled through Polanski -- in a burning house, the heroine must contend with a mad slasher while slipping in and out of hallucinations, her rescuer stabbed and bleeding to death on the floor at the foot of the fiery flight of stairs. This operatic climax is derivative but wonderfully staged: Hitchcock's Psycho in a house on fire with an endless flight of stairs that keeps morphing into a massive sinister and gleaming movie set, a bit like the celestial staircase in Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death with a legion of hideous spooks thrusting their arms through walls and floor and ceiling to drag the heroine down to hell with them . It's a tremendous climax to the film although wildly overwrought after the manner of Brian de Palma -- and this brings the movie to a satisfying ending. There's a brief coda, a supposedly happy ending, that is, however, tinged with a little bit of nightmare.
Parts of the plot make no sense and the film is repetitious in some respects. But it gives Diana Rigg a last chance to rage on-screen and the script is intelligent and very ingeniously wrought. The horror elements of the movie are well-staged, although derivative. The first thirty minutes showing Ellie bullied and harassed by mean girls in her dorm are heart-breaking and the sequences showing stylish London in 1965 slowly slipping into a lurid nightmare are very exciting and compelling. At first, we think that Alexandra, who looks uncannily like Ellie (although much more glamorous and depraved) is purely a figment of the heroine's imagination. But as the film develops, we learn that Alexandra is a different character -- not merely a disassociated fragment of Ellie's pathological imagination. However, it wasn't until looking at the closing credits that I realized that Ellie and Alexandra, although posited as mirror images of one another, were played by different actresses. The film suggests that the dark underbelly of the swinging sixties was vicious misogyny and exploitation -- something that may well be true of any era so self-consciously stylish and fashion-obsessed. This theme is suggested by a sequence in which Alexandra performs an erotic dance as a marionette on a string. Both of the female actresses are ethereally beautiful with huge eyes, alternately innocent and debauched. (The parts are played by Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy.) There's a lot to admire in this film and, unlike most of its genre, Last Night in Soho not something you are likely to forget an hour or two later.
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