Last Night in Soho (2021)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Last Night in Soho (2021) – E. Wright

Although there are clearly aspects of his work that would fit with auteur theory, it seems easier to view Edgar Wright’s films as purely commercial endeavours. They aim to be crowd-pleasing and cater to the audience’s surface needs. His collaborations with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, 2004; Hot Fuzz, 2007) were funny enough and Scott Pilgrim (2010) was certainly camp enough, playing to the hip crowd, but I wasn’t sure what to make of Baby Driver (2017), considering it more style than substance, a slick piece of genre work that again strove to signify its hipness rather than doing more than that.  Last Night in Soho (filmed in 2019 but released in 2021) is similarly slick and commercial, teasing the audience with the sexiness of its leads (Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy) and a Swingin’ London vibe but instead careening into psychological thriller territory with a Me Too-styled critique of the Sixties. McKenzie plays a “country mouse” (Eloise) who comes to the Big Smoke to study fashion design (present day) but when she lets a bedsit from aged Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg) she begins having visions/nightmares of Taylor-Joy as a wanna-be singer (Sandie) who is instead forced into prostitution and potentially murdered.  For all intents and purposes, it seems that Eloise is going crazy for most of the film, a concerning and downbeat narrative that is nevertheless filmed with colour/style/flash. The plot does rescue itself from this dead end but never quite manages to deal with all of the issues it raises in a satisfying way.  It seems content enough to mention the terrible treatment of women (and to show it) rather than necessarily to digest things fully (Should we have sympathy for the murderer, that is?). At the same time, Wright the stylist has a lot of fun with the Sixties soundtrack and the casting of Rita Tushingham, Terence Stamp, Margaret Nolan, and of course Rigg, all British stars from those (possibly not so good) old days. To conclude, I’m ambivalent about this film which I enjoyed for its shiny surfaces but disliked for its unwillingness to dig too much beneath them.