Last Night in Soho review: A stylish thriller full of Edgar Wright’s obsessions

Edgar Wright is an artist perennially wedded to vibes, but that’s seldom meant a loss of substance. Und und Last Night at SohoThe vibes in ‘The Swinging Sixties’, which is a Wright movie, are numerous. There’s the karaoke score, with contemporaneous bangers from Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield, The Kinks, and John Barry. There’s costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux’s stunning haute couture, her white PVC macs and bubblegum-pink ballgowns evoking the best of Sixties style, pulled from the heroines of Mario Bava and Michelangelo Antonioni. And Wright himself brings his encyclopedic film knowledge to the table, as has become his directorial signature, with a smorgasbord of ’60s cinematic reference points.

The most grizzled Wright apologists among us know he’s been doing this kind of thing since the TV series Spacing, one of the greatest satires of the ’90s. But 2004’s Shaun of the Dead It gave Curtis’s stylistic sensibilities an international audience. It isn’t just a heartfelt, gloriously crafted rom-com in the Richard Curtis vein of Notting Hill Four weddingsThis is a. It’s a cinematic introduction to Wright’s bombastic style on the silver screen. You can imagine his fast, intense editing that cuts together half-second whipping pans and smash zooms. Fast-paced montages are rhythmically linked to a Karaoke song. The genre is overtly stylized. This over-the-top tone bleeds into Wright’s sense of humor, for instance when Ed (Nick Frost) shouts Night of the Living Dead’s famous line “We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” in an attempt to reassure his best friend’s mother.

Contemporary directors have cultivated styles that are more metonymic than some of their predecessors. As with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, or, gulp, Michael Bay, when you hear “Edgar Wright,” you tend to know what you’re in for. Last Night at SohoThe Wrightian norm is not a deviation from this. It’s a feast for the cineaste senses, chock full of reference points from giallo maven Dario Argento to the syrup-blood-soaked Hammer Horror flicks of the 1960s. Nearly all shots are flooded with deep reds and neon blues. Soho This is a vivid fantasy, that cleverly takes inspiration from classic horror.

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Here, Wright is as visually indebted to Argento’s Suspiria as he is to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, though the latter may go some way in explaining some of the film’s deeper flaws around the presentation of gendered violence. The film’s gender makeup is novel for Wright, who’s never previously centered a film on female characters. This story centers on Ellie, a shy, precocious fashion school student, in the present. Sandie, a bold, would-be dancehall star, is in the 1960s.

The first act contains some of Wright’s finest work, and the opening sequence is a marvel. Ellie dances around her home in an elaborate ballgown made of newspaper to Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love,” in a scene that speaks to Ellie’s profound nostalgia, her poverty, and her creativity all at the same time. It’s also a reminder of Wright’s affinity for needle-drops. Even before reality distorts, this is a young woman deeply invested in the past: not in an obnoxious, “born in the wrong decade” way, but demonstrative of trauma so potent that distant eras become an escapist salve.

Ellie leaves her small, rural British home quickly to travel to London with a record player in hand and a bag full of vinyls. London can seem almost magical to a child like Ellie. It is a place where dreams are alive and it has countless centuries. Aspirealism is one. Last Night at Soho’s implicit themes, particularly the desire to make a mark on the world, and leave a legacy behind. Where better, then, to place Ellie’s story than the concrete time capsule of London, where myriad hopes have been realized, and legacies are etched into the city’s rebar bones and marble plinths?

Ellie heads to her residence hall and is given her first lesson by a snarky taxi driver. “Are you a model?” he asks, practically salivating. She is shocked to see the subtleties in her fantasies, including the perverse taxi drivers and bully-ish friends. The latter group revolves around Ellie’s deeply insecure roommate Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), an amalgamation of every Prada, the Devil’s Armour Trope Under the Sun Wright is known for his quick line reading and clever jokes. Karlsen is given the film’s best: “I tried vaping,” she says, preparing a cigarette, “but it makes you look like a cunt.”

When Ellie leaves the dorm to stay in a bedsit on Goodge Street (leaving aside the realities of a poor kid with a bursary being able to afford the neighborhood’s extortionate rent) Wright’s stylistic flair-ometer shoots to 110. Ellie, who is being lulled to sleep through her music, falls into bed. Her eyes are drawn back into the past and she emerges in Leicester Square. A grandiose Thunderball marquee suggests it’s 1965 — notably, the year of Repulsion

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The opening strings of Cilla Black’s “You’re My World” sound eerily similar to the famous Psycho Score is better suited for horror movies than pop music. Wright’s passion for needle-drops emerges again, as Ellie hears this song as she enters the past. The heady, lovelorn charm of Black’s lyrics eerily juxtapose against the jarring shrillness of the song’s opening notes. It turns out that Black is actually performing the song in the scene for her adoring audience of frocks and tuxes. The images are dream-like, a product of Ellie’s deepest nostalgic fantasies — and seemingly Wright’s as well.

That’s just one example of how Wright’s penchant for pop music comes through in Soho. The soundtrack is the catchiest and vibiest, of his filmography — even more so than Baby DriverWall-to wall bops. On the one hand, he uses iconic ’60s tracks to emphasize the film’s fantasy: As that opening scene establishes, one of the reasons Ellie is so wedded to the past is her adoration of the music.

This also allows the audience to be part of the story. Similar to Baby DriverSome of these songs are, crucially and knowingly, on-the nose: They will be released soon after Soho takes a more explicitly supernatural turn, for example, R. Dean Taylor’s “There’s a Ghost in My House” is cued. It’s enjoyably catchy, but more than thematically pertinent. And as the use of Carla Thomas’ “B-A-B-Y” refers to the eponymous protagonist in Driver, a scene in Soho’s final act sees Ellie serenaded with a rendition of Barry Ryan’s emphatic foot-tapper “Eloise.”

Some of these numbers may be later than others. Soho Switching tonally from something darker can be a terrible thing. When Sandie is pushed to feature in a lewd stage performance, made up like a marionette doll, she dances suggestively to Sandie Shaw’s campy, cabaret-style tune “Puppet on a String.” (Speaking to its campiness, it was the UK’s first Eurovision winner, in 1967.) In another Wrightian subversion, the silliness of the song becomes tragedy, as Sandie’s attempts at stardom head in a dark direction.

It is an exemplary directorial decision to use such a famous song as a foundation for her emotional turmoil. Soho’s most compelling conceit. Wright’s career has been marked by, and wedded to, an adoration of the cultural past. He argues that this is a false desire and that it’s just an illusion.

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There’s a lot to balance in Soho, though, and Wright isn’t always successful. His previous films are far from vacuous, but they’re comparatively inconsequential. There’s the zombie comedy, the buddy cop/murder mystery, the Body snatchersHommage, the superhero pastiche and heist flick. (Which might be his crowning achievement, save for the unfortunate-in-retrospect casting of alleged sex offenders Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx.) Wright might have wanted something more with his first female protagonist. Soho It deals with far more serious themes than ever before: Abject Sexual Violence, Psychopathy, Suicide and Depression, Memory and Trauma.

While he maintains his stylistic pomp and flourish — that aesthetic deftness his fans expect — the characters, plot, and said hefty themes, are thin on the page in the final act. Ellie is drained of agency, her erratic mental state increasingly evocative of Carol’s in Repulsion. She embodies the histrionics that typified the women of classic giallo horror, in a jarring example of Wright’s affinity for homage. A motif where she sees her dead mother in mirrors isn’t fully realized, which inadvertently serves to trivialize her mental trauma.

In one Hammer-esque scene, Wright’s overt stylization explodes into a kaleidoscopic mushroom cloud of showy genre evocation. A victim’s eyes are seen in reflection in the blade of a raised knife, and strawberry sauce gets thrown around the place as the weapon repeatedly descends. While Soho remains a feast for the senses until the very end, framing ongoing sexual violence in such an exploitative fashion risks superficiality, even when he’s consciously evoking giallo, particularly Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace

Centrally, as a study of Wright’s own nostalgic proclivities, Soho He is a remarkable cultural object. He’s demonstrated an interest in the frailty of nostalgia in previous works. He is an In Hot Fuzz The World’s EndCharacters can’t be trusted with unrealistic nostalgia, so they are often criticized. Stylistically, though, he’s always leaned into homage, again going as far back as SpacingWith its many visual and textual references, and to Hollywood and other more obscure cinemas. Homage in itself is adjacent to nostalgia: It’s the celebration, in Wright’s case, of past styles and aesthetics, and deep, wistful love for decades-old cinema percolates through his filmography.

Soho feels like Wright’s most explicit interrogation of his own sentimental impulses, and simultaneously, his most stylistically grandiose work. The brutal and unconcerned exploiting of women is also central to the story. This is certainly Edgar Wright at his Edgar Wright-iest, but even as he’s arguing against celebrating the past in Last Night at Soho, he’s celebrating it himself, in ways that are hard to escape, and at times, harder still to enjoy.

Last Night at SohoOctober 29th, in theatres