KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #42: LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (co-wri/dir by Edgar Wright, UK, 2021)
“It’s the least I can do.”
“What’s the most?”
I saw the trailer for Last Night in Soho some months back, and I’ve been gagging to see it ever since. Could it possibly live up to the trailer? Would it be one of those situations where the trailer is a perfect short film unto itself and adding a whole film around it actually lessened the experience then added to it?
Pfft, don’t be silly, Edgar Wright wouldn’t do us like that!
In his first film from an entirely female POV, he tells the story of Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), a young Cornish woman who is obsessed with the 1960s, who goes to London to study fashion design. She lives with her grandmother (Rita Tushingham), her mother having died many years before, but she still sees her in the mirror. Is she a little crazy, or does she have second sight?
When she gets to London, she doesn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the students, so she leaves the dorm and gets a bedsit in Soho, her landlady being the great Diana Rigg, in her final role.
She starts to have dreams about the Swinging ‘60s, and a girl named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, who proves again that her period face works perfectly in any period), who wants to be a pop star. The dreams start out great, Sandie meets Jack (Matt Smith), who is going to manage her and help her reach the heights, but they start getting darker and darker, as Sandie’s life doesn’t exactly go as she had planned. Was she real? Is her ghost haunting Ellie? Or is Ellie going mad?
This movie is so stylish, between the clothes, the cars, and the music, but it also shows the seamy side of the past, how it wasn’t all glamour and Mary Quant and long false eyelashes, but mediocre men thinking that extraordinary women exist only to please them, and once you fall down that hole, it’s a long way up again.
The modern half of the movie is as strong as the older half, with Thomasin McKenzie as a cracker of a heroine. Anya Taylor-Joy is such a presence, the fact that when she is offscreen we are just as happy to follow Ellie is quite a feat of casting.
I thought Thomasin looked familiar, but what I really recognized was her funny, toddling walk. Then I remembered that she was the little daughter grown up suddenly in Old, a movie I liked very much, and that walk was perfect for a small child in an unfamiliar, older body. It also worked beautifully for a girl in the big city, unsure of what is going on or what she is experiencing is real.
But with all that in mind, the story, the images, everything, the best thing about this movie is the casting of the older characters. Because whenever you see a person who is over seventy, that actor was a face of Swinging London, a shooting star in the ‘60s, and not just Diana Rigg and Terence Stamp, playing a mysterious and creepy old man who might have had something to do with Sandie’s fate, but all of them.
Rita Tushingham, who plays the grandmother, is probably best remembered as the daughter of Lara and Dr. Zhivago, but she was also Jo in A Taste of Honey, and Nancy in The Knack…and How to Get It. Margaret Nolan, who played the very small role of a barmaid, but definitely was recognizable, was in Goldfinger, and A Hard Day’s Night, and several Carry On films.
Having these people in this film is such a laser detail, even if you don’t know it, you can feel it, you can feel the authenticity of the period.
It’s funny that this film is classified as horror, though of course it is, what with ghosts and psychic visions and faceless grey man demons, etc, but what it’s really about is how you can be lost and alone, and either people take advantage of you, or they help you. Either you make it out the right way, the wrong way, or no way.
The real horror is what a never-ending river of grasping men can do to a woman trying to make her way, much more than vengeful spirits.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog
