Last Night in Soho Review: A Stylish Thriller Filled With Edgar Wright’s Obsessions

Edgar Wright is an artist perennially married to vibes, but that rarely means a loss of substance. And in Last night in Soho, a Wright movie partially set in the sixties, the vibes are innumerable. There’s the karaoke score, with contemporary themes 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 ball gowns evoking the best of 1960s style, drawn from the heroines of Mario Bava and Michelangelo Antonioni. And Wright himself brings his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, as it has become his signature as a director, with a smorgasbord of sixties cinematic landmarks.

The grizzier Wright apologists among us know that he’s been doing this sort of thing since the TV series. Spacing, one of the greatest satires of the nineties. But 2004 Shaun of the dead gave his stylistic sensibilities an international platform. It’s not just a heartfelt and gloriously crafted rom-com in Richard Curtis’s vein of Notting hill and Four weddings. It’s a cinematic introduction to Wright’s bombastic style on the big screen. Think: his frenetic, fast-paced editing, clipping half-second pans and crushing zooms; fast-paced montages, often rhythmically synced to a karaoke score; overtly stylized genre evocation. This exaggerated tone bleeds into Wright’s sense of humor, for example, when Ed (Nick Frost) yells Night of the Living DeadThe famous phrase “We’re going to find you, Barbara!” in an attempt to reassure his best friend’s mother.

Few contemporary directors are as metonymic in their cultivated styles. As with Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino or, I gulp, Michael Bay, when you listen to “Edgar Wright,” you tend to know what to expect. Last night in Soho it hardly differs from the expected Wrightian norm. It’s a feast for the filmmaker’s senses, packed with landmarks from the maven giallo Dario Argento to the syrup-soaked blood-soaked Hammer Horror films of the 1960s. Almost every shot is awash in neon blues and deep reds. Soho it’s a colorful fantasy that knowingly cuts through the nostalgic fabric of classic horror.

Here, Wright is visually indebted to Argento Suspiria as it is for Roman Polanski RepulsionAlthough the latter may go some way to explaining some of the film’s deeper flaws around the presentation of gender-based violence. The genre composition of the film is first for Wright, who has never focused a film on female characters before. But this story converges on two of them: precocious and shy fashion school student Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) in the present, and bold aspiring ballroom star Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) in the 1960s. .

The first act contains some of Wright’s best work, and the opening sequence is a blast. Ellie dances at home in an elaborate newspaper gown to the beat of Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love” in a scene that speaks to Ellie’s deep nostalgia, poverty and creativity all at the same time. . It is also a reminder of Wright’s affinity for needle drops. Even before reality is distorted, this is a young woman deeply invested in the past: not in an unpleasant way, “born in the wrong decade”, but demonstrative of a trauma so powerful that distant times become a balm. escapist.

Ellie quickly leaves her sheltered British country town for the long journey to London, with a record player and a suitcase of vinyls in tow. London is downright mythical for a damp-eyed girl like Ellie: great smoke breathes centuries of dreams. Aspirationalism is one of Last night in SohoImplicit themes, particularly the desire to make a mark on the world and leave a legacy. Where better, then, to place Ellie’s story than London’s concrete time capsule, where countless hopes have been realized and legacies are etched into the city’s armor bones and marble plinths?

On her way to her residence, Ellie receives her first lesson in London from a lewd taxi driver. “You are a model?” he asks, practically salivating. For the first time, he sees the insidious imperfections in his fantasy, from wicked taxi drivers to fellow bullies. The latter group revolves around Ellie’s deeply insecure roommate Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), an amalgamation of all the The Devil Wears Prada trope under the sun. Wright loves nimble line reading, and his scripts are always loaded with witty banter. Karlsen gets the best of the movie: “I tried to vape,” he says, preparing a cigarette, “but it makes you look like a bastard.”

When Ellie leaves the dorm to stay in a dorm on Goodge Street (putting aside the realities of a poor kid on a scholarship who can pay the neighborhood’s exorbitant rent), Wright’s stylistic flair shoots up to 110. Jumping into bed , goes numb. Ellie is drawn into the past by her vinyls, emerging in Leicester Square. Magnificent Thunderball marquee suggests that it is 1965, in particular, the year of Repulsion.

The opening strings of Cilla Black’s “You’re My World” sound eerily similar to the famous ones. Psychopath score: better for a horror movie, perhaps, than a romantic pop ballad. Wright’s passion for needle drops emerges again, when Ellie listens to this song while stepping into the past. The intoxicating, in love charm of Black’s lyrics is eerily juxtaposed with the strident stridency of the song’s opening notes. And it turns out that Black herself is performing the song within the scene, for an adoring crowd in tuxedos and dresses. The images are like a dream, the product of Ellie’s deepest nostalgic fantasies, and apparently Wright’s as well.

That’s just one example of how Wright’s penchant for pop music manifests itself in Soho. The soundtrack is the catchiest and most vibrant of his filmography, even more than Baby driver, which is wall-to-wall bops. For one thing, it uses iconic tracks from the ’60s to emphasize the film’s fantasy: As the opening scene sets, one of the reasons Ellie is so married to the past is her adoration for music.

And it also places the audience in the era. The same as Baby driver, some of the songs are crucial, consciously on the nose: Shortly after Soho takes a more explicitly supernatural turn, for example, “There is a ghost in my house” by R. Dean Taylor is indicated. It’s pleasantly catchy, but more than thematically relevant. And since Carla Thomas’s use of “BABY” refers to the eponymous protagonist in Driver, a scene in SohoThe final act sees Ellie being accompanied by a serenade with a rendition of Barry Ryan’s emphatic “Eloise.”

Some of the later issues, like Soho tonally changes to something completely darker, carries a terrible irony. When Sandie is pushed into a raunchy performance on stage, dressed up like a puppet doll, she dances suggestively to Sandie Shaw’s cabaret-style country tune “Puppet on a String.” (Speaking of cheesy, he was the first Eurovision winner in the UK, in 1967.) In another Wright subversion, the song’s silliness turns to tragedy, as Sandie’s attempts to achieve stardom go in a dark direction.

Using such an iconic song to shore up your emotional turmoil is a skillful choice of direction that also points to Sohothe most compelling presumption. Wright’s career has been marked and tied to the worship of the cultural past. But here, he fights the urge, with the message that nostalgia is just a pair of rose-tinted glasses, obscuring darker realities hidden beneath the dazzling surface.

However, there is a lot to balance in Soho and Wright is not always successful. His previous films are far from empty, but they are comparatively inconsequential. There’s the zombie comedy, the murder mystery / cop buddy, the Body thieves tribute, the superhero pastiche and the heist movie. (Which might be his biggest accomplishment, save for the unfortunate retrospective casting of suspected sex offenders Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx.) Wright may have wanted to do something meaningful with his first female lead, but Soho it deals with subjects far more important than any of its predecessors: abject sexual violence, psychopathy, suicide and depression, memory and trauma.

While he maintains his pomp and stylistic flair, that aesthetic prowess expected by his fans, characters, plot, and such important themes are scarce on the page in the final act. Ellie is drained of agency, her erratic mental state increasingly evoking Carol’s in Repulsion. She embodies the histrionics that characterized the women of classic giallo horror, in a jarring example of Wright’s affinity for homage. A motive in which he sees his mother dead in the mirrors is not fully realized, which inadvertently serves to trivialize his mental trauma.

In a Hammer-style scene, Wright’s overt stylization explodes into a kaleidoscopic mushroom cloud of striking genre evocation. The eyes of a victim are reflected in the blade of a raised knife, and strawberry sauce is thrown around the place as the weapon is lowered repeatedly. Weather Soho It remains a feast for the senses to the very end, framing ongoing sexual violence in such an exploitative way risks being superficial, even when consciously evoking the giallo, particularly that of Mario Bava. Blood and black lace.

Centrally, as a study of Wright’s own nostalgic leanings, Soho it is a fascinating cultural object. He has shown interest in the fragility of nostalgia in previous works. On Hot fluff and World’s End, the characters are in debt and punished by unreal nostalgia. Stylistically, however, he always leaned toward homage, going back to Spacing, with its innumerable visual and textual references to Hollywood and the most esoteric cinema. The homage itself is adjacent to nostalgia: it is the celebration, in Wright’s case, of past styles and aesthetics, and a deep, nostalgic love for decades-long cinema seeps through his filmography.

Soho it feels like Wright’s most explicit questioning of his own sentimental impulses and, at the same time, his most stylistically grandiose work. But also central to this story is the horrifying and violent exploitation of women. This is certainly Edgar Wright in his most Edgar Wright version, but even when he’s arguing against celebrating the past in Last night in SohoHe is celebrating it himself, in ways that are hard to escape and sometimes even harder to enjoy.

Last night in Soho opens in theaters on October 29.