Review: Last Night in Soho Takes a Bold Swing at Retro Horror, and Mostly Misses

Right from the start of Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, it’s clear that Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) isn’t your typical Gen Zer. Throughout the opening credits, she exuberantly bounces around the halls of her grandmother’s (Rita Tushingham) Cornwall countryside home to the tune of Peter and Gordon’s “A World Without Love” while adorned in a homemade dress made out of old newspapers. Obsessed as she is with the Swinging Sixties, the walls of her bedroom are plastered with ephemera from the era. So when Eloise is accepted into a prestigious London fashion design academy, she’s overjoyed at the prospect of exploring a storied environment that she’s long-worshiped from afar.

Upon arriving in bustling London, bright-eyed Eloise faces ridicule from her dormmates for listening to “that granny shit” and wearing outmoded clothes. So when she comes across an ad for a vacant room inside a home in the heart of the Soho district, she jumps at the chance. Easily endearing herself to the house’s owner (Diana Rigg, in her final film role), she moves into a cozy little upstairs space that’s hypnotically illuminated through the window by the red and blue neon sign of the neighbouring French restaurant. But the room’s solace from the present comes forth in a much more psychedelic way at night when it becomes a strange time warp back into the ’60s, where Eloise ventures out into the period-specific nightlife as the invisible shadow of a chic, aspiring singer named Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy).

In some ways, Eloise is a stand-in for Wright himself, who’s spent his career crafting art that speaks to his various pop-cultural influences. We get a sense of that in his vibrant recreation of Leicester Square in the mid-’60s, lit by a huge cinema marquee and poster advertising the opening of Thunderball. As Eloise invisibly follows Sandy into the legendary Café de Paris, on her way to try and become the nightclub’s next successful act, the film immerses us in the lights, music, and merry hubbub of a London hotspot that feels like nothing less than the center of the world. But while the basic concept of the film is similar to that of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, it isn’t shot through with ironic self-awareness, which is somewhat surprising since Wright’s work so often tends toward jokey pastiche.

Last Night in Soho, then, is Wright’s first attempt at a straight horror film. While Sandy at first seizes the attention of a slippery talent manager, Jack (Matt Smith), and nails a subsequent audition with a heartfelt rendition of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” she soon gets a crash course in the dark side of the industry. Starting as a background performer at a more unsavory club nearby and pushed into prostitution by Jack as a way to get ahead, Sandy endangers herself in a downward spiral of despair from which it seems like there’s no exit. Meanwhile, Eloise can only stand by helplessly, watching in panic as one john after the next makes their way up to Sandy’ room, forcing themselves on her until violence inevitably erupts.

Wright sets himself up perfectly for an interrogation of the misogyny of a bygone pop era. When Eloise, who initially assumes that she’s dreaming her way into the Swinging Sixties, starts to hallucinate of Sandy, Jack, and various johns during the light of day, the sins of the past not only flood the present but bleed into it. Already having changed her hair and makeup in homage to Sandy, Eloise begins to viscerally feel her doppelganger’s pain as spirits begin to bridge the temporal gap between past and present in terrifying and gruesome ways.

In the end, though, Wright isn’t particularly interested in taking aim at all that is dark in the zealotry that shapes a culture. He signals to all that dirty business as the progressively minded Eloise becomes the detective in a supernatural sleuth investigation, but he’s more interested in using an overloaded narrative to indulge in all matter of familiar horror tropes. In everything from its use of color, POV shots, and images that play with perspective and reality, Last Night in Soho draws much inspiration from the giallo’s constellation of tropes to conjure a suspenseful fever dream. But as the film becomes increasingly unwieldy, it’s as if Wright is leading us down a rabbit hole inspired almost as much by your run-of-the-mill horror exercise, from the litany of jump scares to the faceless, grabby ghouls haunting a library.

Wright does attempt to free Last Night in Soho from derivativeness with a final twist that complicates the narrative and truly confronts the darkness and trauma that echo across time from the underbelly of the ’60s. But it’s only a momentary confrontation, as soon the film is pulling us again in too many directions on the road to a conventionally loud climax and a quick, neat denouement that’s intent on sending us on our way with smiles on our faces. And in reverting to his jovial old ways in the end, Wright betrays the initial promise of a throwback genre piece that dares to reckon with the aspects of the past that we hope will remain hidden.