Review: Last Night in Soho
It’s been four years since writer-director Edgar Wright released Baby Driver (2017), a movie that made a huge impression on that subset of audience which regularly finds itself fatigued by uninspired material. Then as now, sequels and reboots fueled so much of the action that exploded across our screens, and there were few established voices in Hollywood prepared to offer or capable of producing vibrant, new stories.
Baby Driver was a bracingly original work that found a way to balance the showy with the sensitive, the bombastic with the precise, and it rhapsodized the relationship between music and imagination in a way that no one had been able to do since Bob Fosse. (Including Damien Chazelle.)
Or at least, such is my memory. I haven’t actually seen the movie since it was in theaters — and a lot has changed since then. Namely, #MeToo happened. And so, perversely, Baby Driver became notable as the last time that audiences were willing to watch a performance by Kevin Spacey. (When another of Spacey’s films, All the Money in the World, was released just six months later, it had been re-shot with Christopher Plummer playing uderstudy.)
All of this is what made me eager to love Last Night in Soho, Mr. Wright’s latest outing and a movie that begs to be good. It’s about a bright, chipper young woman named Ellie (played by the phenomenal Thomasin McKenzie) who has a designer’s mind and has just been accepted to London College of Fashion. She can also see dead people — specifically her mother, who appears behind Ellie’s shoulder when she looks into mirrors.
But Ellie’s gran (Rita Tushingham) alludes to a more disconcerting history of visions that the girl has experienced. “Don’t worry,” Ellie reassures her while packing for school. “I never seem mum anymore.”
She arrives in London and promptly discovers that it’s a horrible place — filled with leering cabbies and Coca-Cola product placements. So vile is her roommate (whose name is Jocasta and who lies about an uncle who died by suicide in order to one-up Ellie’s own sad backstory) that she rents a flat in a dingy building run by the perfunctory Miss Collins (Diana Rigg). The vintage suite actually proves the ideal space for Ellie to dream about London in the Swinging Sixties — and indeed, in her sleep she imagines herself a glamorous singer (played by Anya Taylor-Joy on what is the victory lap of her It-Girl-of-the-Pandemic Tour) who enters that decade’s bright night life on the arm of a dashing yet potentially violent man (Matt Smith).
When these dreams take a turn for the nightmare, Ellie comes to suspect that they may be more than mere projections. Could they in fact be memories… memories of a life that ended on the very bed in which she sleeps every night?
One deduces from this movie’s premise that Edgar Wright is responding to the cultural moment in which he finds himself; of the seven feature films he’s directed so far, this is the first to focus on a woman protagonist — and in its opening moments, he displays the same emotional attentiveness, the same mastery of pacing that made Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead (2004) so memorable. You nuzzle your way into what feels like a pair of safe directorial hands.
How disarming, then, after an hour or so, to find that they’re struggling to keep you in the air. Last Night in Soho should be a lean, disciplined exercise in the retroactive acknowledgement of abuse that women have endured in the entertainment industry, yet somehow it flounders. Not simply because its jumps in plausibility are often greater than those of an Olympic hurdler: it’s as though Wright can’t quite bring himself to place the onus of destructive behavior fully on men’s heads. He makes a great show of what scum men can be (e.g. pimps, johns, Terrence Stamp), and sets us up to believe that a man acted badly, murderously — but in a final twist, it’s a woman who’s done wrong. You can’t be a feminist and eat your cake, too, Edgar.
Yet the movie still insists that it is progressive. The conclusion it reaches — revealing that a sex worker murdered dozens of nonviolent clients while also positing that these murders were justified — fumbles to deliver a moment of true female badassery because the only way it knows how to do this is by validating psychotic behavior. Yes, the world of prostitution is seedy, exploitative and rooted in the historic enslavement of women’s bodies, but when a person pays for sex and honors the conditions as laid out by the sex worker, that person has done nothing wrong. Nothing, certainly, that warrants their murder.
It’s because Edgar Wright chooses to suggest the opposite that this movie ends up falling in line with other recent, “empowering” tales of women manipulating others in order to achieve a kind of egotistic catharsis, like Promising Young Woman (2020) or Gone Girl (‘14). Such movies are not feminist — in fact, they are covertly patriarchal, because they encourage the same narcissistic thinking that leads men to perpetuate violence against women in the first place.
Empowerment is about more than “getting even,” or exacting revenge. It’s about collectively rising above, and risking visibility, in spite of the world’s best efforts to keep you down.
This film’s misplaced sympathy for avenging women extends to its protagonist, too. Good as Ms McKenzie may be, the character of Ellie is so deranged, so preoccupied with her visions that, in one instance, she nearly stabs a female classmate and, in another, implicates an innocent Black man of rape. She bolts into traffic so many times that I ended up praying she’d be hit by a car. The argument against misogyny is not complicated, yet Last Night in Soho bends itself through hoops trying to convince us that, yeah, women are alright… even if they are a little crazy.
It’s yet another crime flick that assigns liability to a femme fatale, and excuses the destruction of human life in the name of entertainment. But Last Night in Soho’s twists and turns aren’t thrilling enough to distract from the warped thinking that’s behind the wheel.
