Last Night in Soho
Edgar Wright (2021)
If this is the psychological horror film that Wikipedia claims then it’s fair to say Edgar Wright majors on the horror at the expense of the psychology. Last Night in Soho, showing at the London Film Festival, runs close on two hours. The first hour keeps you interested and entertained; the second is increasingly, and garishly, monotonous.
Teenager Eloise (Ellie) Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) lives in Redruth, Cornwall with her grandmother Peggy (Rita Tushingham) – Ellie’s mother is dead and there’s no mention of who or where her father is. It’s the present day but the girl’s heart is in the 1960s. She’s obsessed with the decade’s pop music, and its clothes. She dreams of becoming a successful fashion designer and Wright’s story gets underway with the arrival of the letter Ellie’s been longing to receive – the offer of a place to study at the London College of Fashion. In her youth, Peggy spent time in London and she warns Ellie to take care in the big city. This is a bit more than standard grandmotherly advice at the outset of a fairy tale: Peggy reminds Ellie that her own mother, who was also in London for a time, allowed things to ‘get too much’ for her, and eventually took her own life. Peggy is already concerned about her granddaughter’s mental health, well aware that Ellie sometimes has visions of her late mother (Aimee Cassettari). We know this, too, from the film’s opening sequence in Ellie’s bedroom.
In London, Ellie is soon, and reasonably, looking to move out of her student accommodation in Kings Cross – so as to escape from a coven of metro-hedonists who look down their noses at a country mouse and whose ringleader is her roommate, the domineering, pleased-with-herself Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen). Ellie rents a Fitzrovia bedsit – at 8 Goodge Place (a real London W1 address) – where her landlady, and the house’s only other occupant, is the elderly Miss Collins (Diana Rigg). At night, Ellie’s sixth sense transports her to mid-sixties Soho and its environs. Thunderball is showing at the Odeon Leicester Square; in the Café de Paris, where Cilla Black (Beth Singh) is onstage, a blonde girl called Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) is determined to follow in Cilla’s footsteps and attracts the attention of spivvy Jack (Matt Smith). The vaguely threatening atmosphere and lack of other stars in evidence ensure that Ellie’s nocturnal journeys, even the early ones, aren’t quite Midnight in Paris territory but Edgar Wright sets things up intriguingly. Ellie is and isn’t reincarnated as Sandie: the one turns into the other and back as she dances with Jack but Ellie is also sometimes shown on screen observing Sandie. The time travel occurs only when Ellie’s in her bed chez Miss Collins. Are her dreams (soon to be nightmares) generated by the girl’s own 1960s-mania? Or by a kind of ‘platzgeist’ – is Sandie somehow linked to the rented room?
Ellie inclines to the latter view, and she’s right – though she also gets the wrong end of the stick. At first, Sandie inspires her to dye her own hair blonde and come up with 1960s fashion ideas that impress her tutor (Elizabeth Berrington). But when Sandie discovers that vocal talent isn’t enough to advance her singing career and becomes a sex worker, with Jack morphing into her vicious pimp, Ellie is possessed of the conviction that Sandie came to a bad end – murdered, in the place where Ellie now lives. She gets bar work to help pay the rent on the bedsit and becomes increasingly suspicious of a sinister, elderly barfly (Terence Stamp), nicknamed ‘Handsy’, who gives Ellie funny looks and claims, once she is blonde, to recognise her. By the time he’s acknowledged he once knew a prostitute by the name of Sandie who lived in Goodge Place, Ellie has decided that Handsy was responsible for her avatar’s death. She’s mistaken on both counts. The climax to the film reveals that Sandie and Miss (Alexandra) Collins are the same person. Murders did occur in the house where she has lived for over half a century but Sandie was the killer. The murderees were men who used her for sex.
Ellie’s limits as a visionary are designed to allow Wright to put on the screen his heroine’s mistaken impression of what happened, as well as, eventually, what really did happen. Both are rendered in flamboyantly macabre, flickering images (many of them optically punishing) – which may gladden the hearts of giallo fans but don’t cut it with viewers looking for a convincingly worked-out story into the bargain. Last Night in Soho has the potential to lull the audience – especially those of us who remember the 1960s or at least the sixties pop songs that Wright makes good use of – into thinking we’re on a nostalgia trip, which then turns into a bad trip, a means of exposing a noisome underside to Swinging London. In the event, though, the narrative and even the music are smothered in nearly relentless, consequently weightless horror mayhem.
Even allowing that Ellie’s misapprehension of what happened to Sandie is fed by present-day fears around what women are liable to suffer at the hands of men, the film’s sexual politics are a head-scratcher. On arrival in London, Ellie gets into a black cab and is quickly spooked by the cabbie’s off-colour remarks and manner. That’s why she rejects the offer of a young man, sitting on the steps at the entrance to her student residence, to give her a hand with her luggage. This is John (Michael Ajao), the lone male student in Ellie’s group, who soon becomes her only ally; in contrast, Jocasta and her friends are an Ugly Sisterhood for the Cinderella heroine to best. The revelation that Sandie avenged her sexual exploitation by knifing clients and hiding their bodies under the floorboards – 8 Goodge Place as a kind of gender-reversed 10 Rillington Place – has subversive impact. Wright dilutes this by making Miss Collins a homicidal monster: fearing her secret is about to be revealed, she tries to do away with Ellie by poisoning her cup of tea, and John, whom she stabs. (He recovers from his injuries. I didn’t understand how Ellie was able to ignore the poison she’d swallowed.)
Being ‘different’ from their peers draws Ellie and John together. He is certainly that – a rare non-white face in the film’s central London of either the 1960s or the 2020s. He’s shy, loyal, witty – nicer than nice. Michael Ajao is charming and, when required, funny but it’s a demeaning role – and, thanks to John’s racial distinctiveness, a troubling one. In the Cinderella analogy, he’s Buttons rather than Prince Charming. He and Ellie do briefly go to bed together – her idea – but John essentially belongs to the screen tradition of gay men who are a girl’s best friend: he’s given credit for being sexually innocuous. It’s a problem of a different kind that so is Matt Smith. As Jack, he has the dodgy hustler voice and gestures off pat but it’s a cartoon. There’s no threat either in his eyes or under the surface.
Smith’s inadequacy was what first made me think, when Terence Stamp appeared on the scene, how much more compelling a Jack he’d have been in his youth. There’s rather more irony than Wright intends when, later on, we’re encouraged to suspect that Jack aged into Handsy. This is a red herring: it transpires that the Stamp character was well acquainted with local prostitutes through being a member of the Met vice squad. That hardly makes him squeaky clean, which may or may not be Wright’s excuse for having Stamp play the character menacingly. But the menace is effective: it has a real charge and comes across as a humorous put-on. Eighty-three-year-old Terence Stamp – skinny and shambling but still charismatic – is virtually sending up, even censuring, his own ladykiller persona of yesteryear.
Stamp is one of several 1960s screen icons in the film but, by some way, the most successful piece of senior casting. Rita Tushingham’s trademark weirdness is used to obscure the fact that the character of Peggy doesn’t amount to anything much. It’s one of the several disappointments of Wright’s screenplay, which he wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917), that no substantial connection emerges between Ellie’s experiences in London and those of her mother and grandmother. Diana Rigg looks remarkable – perhaps partly, and unhappily, because of her own state of health when the film was made (though shooting was completed, Wikipedia says, before Rigg’s terminal illness was diagnosed). But she always seems a bit grand for the role. The climactic unmasking of Miss Collins might have worked better if the landlady had seemed hard-bitten yet anonymous in the early stages of the story. With Diana Rigg playing her, she’s a somebody only lightly disguised as a nobody.
Wright’s casting of his young leads is just right, however. Thomasin MacKenzie is a naturally truthful, as well an appealing, actress: you keep faith emotionally with Ellie even when you’ve lost belief in the story she’s in. Anya Taylor-Joy’s anime glamour easily supplies the externals essential to the conception of Sandie. Unlike Matt Smith, Taylor-Joy gives these some depth: Sandie’s retreat from bold self-confidence to doing men’s bidding is startling. The choice of name is curious for a would-be pop star of the era, though: you keep waiting for someone to tell her it’s already taken, even before a burlesque performance of ‘Puppet on a String’ in a sleazy club and ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’ on the soundtrack. In the small role of a police officer who listens sympathetically to Ellie’s fantastic claims about a murder that may have happened more than five decades ago, Lisa McGrillis is characteristically excellent. As the LCF tutor, Elizabeth Berrington similarly gives proceedings a shot of refreshing normality during her few minutes on screen.
Last Night in Soho is pathetically vague about what attracts Ellie to another time. It can’t be anything to do with her mother, who wouldn’t have been born before the 1970s; her grandmother embodies the 1960s only through the person playing her. Ellie says she is ‘just drawn to’ this bygone age, and that’s as much as her creators come up with. The film’s chief surprise – eclipsing its revelation of who Miss Collins really is – arrives in the closing scene. It’s the end-of-year show at the London College of Fashion and Ellie’s frocks are going down a storm. Granny Peggy and John are in the audience applauding. Jocasta et al are seething. Big-time fashion houses have stuck their cards on Ellie’s rack of costumes. The designs are all, as they were when she first entered Sandie’s world, sixties-inspired. You’d have thought the traumatic events she’s gone through in the meantime might have taken the shine off the era for Ellie but no, she’s still celebrating it, and without a hint of unease in the air. Thomasin McKenzie makes Ellie likeably decent, and it’s nice to see virtue rewarded, but this finale kills the film as a coming-of-age-rites-of-passage number. The effect, oddly enough, is a little like seeing Travis Bickle back out in his yellow cab at the end of Taxi Driver. In case Edgar Wright feels flattered by that comparison, it’s important to stress the ‘little’.
10 October 2021