Last Night In Soho is a horror/thriller about Ellie(Thomasin McKenzie), a naïve aspiring fashion designer that is struggling with mental illness and/or some supernatural ability, moves to London to go to arts school. Her roommate Jocasta(Synnøve Karlsen) is, inexplicably, a caricature alpha 90's mean girl and forces Ellie to seek other accommodations. She rents a room(how can she possibly afford it) which when she sleeps in it transports her back to swinging 60's London, the period she's obsessed with and nostalgic for. In these sequences she inhabits the body of Sandie(Anya Taylor-Joy) an aspiring singer who gets taken advantage of by Jack(Matt Smith).
McKenzie and Taylor-Joy are both fine actors but are woefully underutilized and let down by a script that has an overly complicated plot, underbaked characters, and failed genre melding. McKenzie gives it her all but the resulting character is a thin, weak, meek, confusing mess. Taylor-Joy is little more than furniture and isn't allowed to any dimension what so ever she is simply the object of protracted abuse. The support cast all function as plot devices and not particularly effectively. Why cast such talented actors if they're little more than pieces on a board?
Co-writer/director Edgar Wright is unarguably an excellent, even inpsired craftsman, there are some striking sequences where Ellie mirrors(literally and figuratively) Sandie and the two swap and swap again, the lighting is stylized and effective, the costumes excellent, the soundtrack transportive. The production across the board, truly top notch. But its rendered virtually pointless by the incoherence of the plotting, the offensive, protracted, and unnecessary use of sexual violence and the threat of sexual violence, bizarre puritanical perspective on sex work, sophomoric implausible rendering of the lead character, on and on.
Although not the most egregious error one that is particularly striking is how undefined the nature of the flashbacks are. Is Ellie dreaming? Is she in the midst of a mental breakdown? Does she posses some supernatural ability? If so what is the nature of it? The reality of what these sequences actually are is never clarified, which may have been OK, but then the visions escalate and begin to encroach on Ellie's reality having real world physical effects. If we are supposed to buy into any of that reality, so that the story has actual stakes, it has to have some definition which is absolutely does not.
An immaculate production fails to elevate a disappointing, juvenile, offensive narrative.
Currently in theaters and available to rent on VOD.
Don't See It.
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