Aimless Retro Fantasy ‘Last Night In Soho’ Is A Puppet On A String
What’s the difference between a ghost, a dream and a psychotic episode? Director Edgar Wright is having too much manipulative fun to care.
About a third of the way in to Last Night in Soho, there’s a pivotal moment. Timid first-year fashion student Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) has escaped her mean-girl roommate Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen) to rent what seems like a magical bedsit from a no-nonsense old lady (Diana Rigg). There, as she sleeps, she can part the chiffon veil between 2021 and 1965, transported into the kitten-heeled shoes of wannabe singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Along with Sandie, Eloise has been swept off her feet by Soho’s glitz… and by suave promoter Jack (Matt Smith).
These nocturnal visions — “the ’60s really speak to me,” she tells her admiring fashion lecturer — have emboldened Eloise to change her hair to resemble Sandie’s, buy a version of Sandie’s white vinyl trenchcoat, get a bartending job at the local pub, and perhaps at last enjoy being young in London.
Now, dream-Eloise readies herself excitedly to watch Sandie sing. But her face falls when Sandie emerges… as a burlesque dancer, dressed as a sexy wind-up doll, gyrating for a slavering all-male audience to Sandie Shaw’s Eurovision-winning 1967 song ‘Puppet on a String’.
Oh no, Eloise seems to be realising, what if 1960s Soho is actually, like… exploitative?
It’s an interesting tipping point, because it’s here that Eloise comes closest to realising that she, like Sandie, has been a starry-eyed fool — but she has mostly been fooling herself. This is really the only moment when Last Night in Soho succeeds in its critique of retro nostalgia — and indicts the audience in this same critique for the pleasure we have been taking along with Eloise.
Otherwise, this is a frustratingly inarticulate film, in which a director who has previously mobilised cinematic language seems happy to play aimlessly with nostalgic fantasies of his own.
Last Night in Soho is simmering with smart ideas and visually exciting moments, but director Edgar Wright — a connoisseur of cinema history who clearly has great affection for 1960s pop culture — seems more interested in indulging in his references than using them to follow through on his themes. He’s always impressed me as a director who understands how to put elements of sound and vision to a purpose — but here the aesthetics are just sliding off the ideas.
As I continued, I felt like Eloise: my excitement seeping away, thinking, oh no, what if Last Night in Soho is actually, like… bad?
Wright is one of Hollywood’s genuinely original visual stylists. He’s particularly known for the way he uses doubling, repetition and synchronisation: he’ll foreshadow and loop back to particular lines of dialogue, shot compositions, camera movements and even whole sequences.
In Last Night in Soho, mirrors act as the interface between Eloise and Sandie, and the first half of the film is full of wonderful set-pieces that revel in the ambiguity of whether both women can sense this uncanny connection, and whether the mirror can be penetrated.
Watched by multiple pyjama-clad Eloises refracted by a mirrored wall, Sandie descends a nightclub staircase wearing her signature costume, a billowing salmon-pink trapeze dress. Then, in a particularly masterful dance sequence, Sandie dances with Jack and, in a swooping 360-degree shot, Taylor-Joy and McKenzie slide gracefully in and out of frame, taking turns to partner Smith.
As Sandie kisses Jack in a mirrored phone booth, her eyes seem to meet Eloise’s over the shoulder of their reflected lover. And as Sandie accepts a lift in Jack’s car, Eloise’s ecstatic face looms in the the darkened window. At this point I was thrilled by the queer subtext: Jack is a pretty bog-standard cockney thug and it should come as no surprise that he doesn’t turn out to be Sandie’s prince — but the two women’s connection does feel romantically charged. Can Eloise champion and even rescue Sandie?
Gradually Eloise comes to suspect that Sandie met with foul play, and it’s Sandie’s ghost she is now seeing and even inhabiting. But the film teases a proposition much more interesting and pointed than anything it ends up settling on: that Eloise is the ghost. That to obsess over the past is to haunt your own present: to be cut off from your vivid surroundings and entrapped in a kind of melancholy, pop-culture-led twilight. Maybe Sandie rescues Eloise.
But then this just goes nowhere.
Apart from the mirroring, Wright also leans on music, which has always been one of his strengths: Baby Driver (2017), an editor’s delight of audio loops, samples and half-remembered melodies, is perhaps the most committed Wright has ever been to the synchronous interplay of music and onscreen action.
Sometimes the reference is easy, like the use of R Dean Taylor’s northern-soul classic ‘There’s A Ghost in My House’, or Barry Ryan’s creepy ‘Eloise’. And sometimes it’s clever: early in the film, a soaring note on the soundtrack cuts suddenly to Eloise’s alarm clock, whose rhythmic beep is perfectly tuned to the same note.
But other musical cues act as foreshadowing to nowhere. Eloise is introduced deep within the nest of her fantasy: dancing around her childhood bedroom to ‘A World Without Love’ by Peter and Gordon, wearing a fabulous retro ballgown made of newspaper. She bumps the record player, and it skips and loops like a portent: here she comes, I know not when…
Wright and his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns (Oscar-nominated for 1917) imply ‘she’ is Eloise’s dead mother, who suffered from mental illness and died by suicide after finding London “a lot”, and whose benign ghost now smiles at her daughter from the mirror. But the delightful pronoun ambiguity — who is anticipating whom? — never pays off.
Eloise’s connection with Sandie becomes increasingly shallow as the film goes on. Unlike the early scenes of sensual encounter and enchantment, the later horror scenes are flippantly handled with little sense of real peril, and the plot becomes increasingly incoherent and implausible.
Even if Wright wanted to make an anti-nostalgic argument about the dangers of idealising the past, this film seems frustratingly disinterested in the ideas of Soho that he wants to save for the present day.
It annoyed me so much that despite the film’s ominous talk about how hard and overwhelming London can be, it actually depicts 2021 Soho as safe, clean and friendly. There’s no racism, no economic insecurity and no street harassment — except from a leering barfly played by Terence Stamp — yet it indulges in the dull, tired and not-nearly-as-feminist-as-it-fancies-itself idea that 1960s Soho was a trap for starry-eyed girls who were forced into violent sex work, the only way out of which is more violence.
I found myself increasingly irritated by what a nothing character Eloise is. Her values and interests don’t seem to extend beyond “the 1960s”, a period of history about which she’s also weirdly naive and apathetic. She’s not even a proper ’60s nerd: she listens to the same few songs, is shocked that vintage clothes are eye-wateringly expensive, and never so much as Googles the people and places she encounters, or asks older people questions.
The film is weirdly reticent to tease out the implication that Eloise has a mental illness and is following her mother’s fatal descent into psychosis, as her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) fears. And indeed, Eloise tells nobody what she is experiencing, afraid of being bullied or disbelieved, or even just making her gran worry. But I think this is just a scripting problem. The plot twists depend on Eloise’s incuriosity, yet they also require her to investigate. So she’s propelled through the story on irrational impulse, jumping to conclusions that turn out to be fatally incorrect.
Another, more sophisticated film might have been more articulate about Eloise’s subjectivity, about what is ‘real’ and ‘not real’, but Last Night in Soho seems uninterested in such distinctions, instead setting up a pretty facile horror scenario in which Sandie’s ‘grim’ exploitation at the hands of ‘bad men’ in the 1960s seeps into Eloise’s 2021 reality, as she is chased by faceless besuited ghouls, and sees blood-soaked visions.
I would have liked the film more if it had leaned in explicitly to its implication that Eloise’s ‘real’ 2021 is the fantasy. After all, everyone in her life tolerates her frequent freak-outs and she never seems at risk of losing her home, her job, her place at university or the affection of John (Michael Ajao), the cute boy who fancies her. (John is clearly drawn to shy, bullied Eloise because of his own otherness. He is kind, and senses kindness in her — although the film is, again, uninterested in juxtaposing John with Sandie’s similarly named beau Jack, except in one acridly racist scene.)
What ultimately frustrated me about this film is that while I enjoyed it less and less the longer I watched, to the point where I was rolling my eyes at its flaccid, unearned climax, I can’t dismiss it easily as ‘bad’. I’ve kept thinking about Last Night in Soho, whereas many other films I watch as a critic just drop out of my mind afterwards.
It’s a film whose constitutive elements are all very intelligent; and the more I ponder it, the more I wonder if the point wasn’t to enjoy the film as a cinema experience, but to provoke that enjoyable post-view pondering: the playlists; the explainers; the costume references. To improve what I saw in retrospect.
A film, however, shouldn’t be like a model aeroplane: a kit of references designed to be ‘put together’ by a viewer. It’s depressing to me that so many incoherent or even patronisingly didactic films are hailed as accomplished, and sophisticated, by viewers who are really pleased by their own accomplishment of decoding what they’ve watched.
Edgar Wright used to make films that also had satisfying, entertaining plots and characters. Now it’s Eloise, not Sandie, who is buffeted aimlessly through the film “like a puppet on a string”; but Wright never grasps the nettle of that irony. Instead, he’s just toying with us.
