Review: Last Night In Soho

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Edgar Wright's films typically subvert genre and, in previous efforts, drew laughs from the expectations one might ascribe to a certain genre - whether it's zombie movies, buddy action films or end-of-the-world scenarios. His 2017 film "Baby Driver" played more like a straightforward action movie - and a very good one it was - and his latest, "Last Night in Soho," is a stylish blending of the horror and Italian giallo genres. 

But while films like "Baby Driver" and "Hot Fuzz" were successful genre subversion exercises for Wright, "Last Night" doesn't quite work. It has a very stylish - and mostly compelling - first half, during which young Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) moves to London - which is referred to as such a dangerous place so often during the film that it almost becomes a joke in itself - to attend fashion school, although her grandmother warns Eloise that her mother, seen only in occasional mirror images, attempted the same and lost her mind in the process before committing suicide.

A lot of the spaces and people in "Last Night in Soho" are haunted. But for a while, that's OK for Eloise, who loves to dream that she had been her age during London's Swinging 60s, rather than in the present. One night, she gets her wish after moving into an attic apartment in the home of an elderly woman named Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg). Eloise's nocturnal adventures involve her making her way through the mid-60s, but in the dream Eloise is in the body - yet sees her own face in mirror reflections - of an aspiring singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy).

The film features one of those aspects that always makes me roll my eyes a little - college students behaving like high school students in movies. In this case, it's the mean girls who treat Eloise like crap, thereby convincing her to move into Mrs. Collins' attic. The only people who pay her any positive attention include a fashion school teacher, her worried grandmother via telephone and a young Black man (Michael Ajao) who takes a romantic interest in her.

There's a scene in which this suitor finds himself in a sticky situation in which a young woman appears to be having some sort of psychotic fit after he nearly sleeps with her, and we see the great level of discomfort he goes through by being a Black man in a screaming white girl's room, but while this scene might have worked well in a film that seriously intended to weigh the consequences of such a scenario, here it seems to exist and then disappear - which makes it sort of a crime to include it in the first place since the filmmakers appear to not seriously address it ever again. 

Even worse, the young man goes to great pains - and I mean literally - to later help the screaming girl, which just seems unrealistic considering all that came first. I'm a little off topic here, but the aforementioned scenario is only one of several in this film that appears to grapple with weighty subject matter, only to take the wrong approach after introducing it. 

Regardless, Eloise soon realizes that the woman in whose body she has been seeing Swinging London was, in fact, murdered, and she first believes the culprit to be an old man she sees in the present day played by Terence Stamp. Once the film begins to be taken over by the murder mystery, "Last Night" loses some steam - there's scene after scene of Eloise seeing a group of male ghosts literally everywhere, and numerous others of her running from various things and then snapping out of trances after she almost does something bad, such as stabbing her roommate with a pair of scissors.

Then, there's the plot twist near the film's end. I wouldn't dare ruin it, and I have to give credit that the concept behind it is fairly strong, but then it's as if the filmmakers don't know how to handle it. Up until this point, the film appeared to be on a somewhat feminist path for a movie of this sort - in which young women are sliced up by a madman - but the manner in which the big reveal is handled goes in a direction that comes off in a pretty bad way. Later, the filmmakers attempt to reconcile these problems, but it feels as if the film's pat ending doesn't quite fit.

There's a reasonable amount to recommend in "Last Night in Soho" - the two female leads are good, when given more to do than just run and scream, and the visuals are often stylish in the way that many giallo films of the 1970s were - strobing neon lights, splashes of red and camera angels reminiscent of that era. But the repetitiveness of some of the film's more ghostly elements, and the bungled manner in which the final scenes are handled detract from the picture overall. It's not a bad movie, but "Last Night in Soho" feels somewhat like a missed opportunity.