Last Night in Soho

I like Edgar Wright, but the more serious he gets, the more I have a problem with it. So I'll always prefer Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz to the shallow and over-stylized Baby Driver. And now over Last Night in Soho. His new release reminded me of Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, a horror film that was great in every way, audiovisually and genre-wise. Only that with this one, I felt like the director was fulfilling a dream of his, paying homage to a favorite genre, a favorite era, and a favorite form. And does it brilliantly, as if he had made the whole thing for himself rather than anyone else. On the other hand, Wright's play with color, the great soundtrack, the gorgeous costumes, and his typical audiovisual games from time to time still work great. And Thomasin McKenzie is excellent, with Anya Taylor-Joy not far from her, but it's not enough. With Last Night in Soho Wright makes mostly himself happy, which I wish him well, but I won't applaud him for it. (03/11/2021)

I'm pretty pleased with Wright's new film, though it does take a weird nosedive during the ride to the finale and struggles to not completely fall apart at the end. At the same time, the acting is brilliant, the sets are great, the direction is imaginative, the soundtrack is polished and the cast is amazing, especially Thomasin McKenzie, who I find to be one of the cutest and most likeable heroines in horror in a long time. The script throws up a number of themes and you wait to see what will come out of them... only to find that many turn out to be nothing. The ending itself makes it seem as if a number of minutes were cut before it, or as if the director and everyone on set suddenly stopped having fun. But I don't want to sound too negative, because I definitely don't have a negative feeling about this film. On the contrary, I was more satisfied than I expected for most of the runtime, and I'm just a little disappointed that the finale didn't go as far as it looked like it might at one point. (04/11/2021)

One sort of expects form over substance from Wright, especially in a film that wets both feet in the waters of Giallo, Lynch and the 1960s. Maybe I wouldn't have expected such a big split between the exquisite form and the empty content, but whatever. The hauntingly enchanting hallucinatory atmosphere makes up for a lot of it, likewise with Wright in some places of the first half, which although it's not without its hiccups, it definitely has something (and especially someone) to build on. Unfortunately, though, Wright decided to start grafting some content in the second half and ruined everything, especially during the final 20 minutes, which are unintentionally ridiculous. What is most fascinating about the whole shattering finale is that even the otherwise top-notch form betrays him during it. (03/11/2021)

With Scott Pilgrim I considered it part of the game, with Baby Driver I couldn't put my finger on it, and with Last Night in Soho it started to get downright annoying. It's that musical staginess drenched in studio lights, its artificiality accelerated by a digital camera with a high frame rate. If it's worked so far in Wright's previous films, it's because they were kind of musicals in the first place, except that Last Night in Soho has its entire plot built on trying to evoke the spirit of the Swingin' London era, and in this case you can have a wardrobe full of period dresses and tons of period props strewn about the studio, but it's still a totally obvious crying game. Logically, then, what works is one great dance sequence and the amazing Thomasin McKenzie, what doesn't work is, eh, well... the rest of the film. And Matt Smith doesn’t know how to inhale. I appreciate the very original twist that the main monster is actually the patriarchy, which I saw six times in genre films last year alone. (09/02/2022)

Edgar Wright has made more evenly balanced films than Last Night in Soho, in which Thomasin McKenzie awakens from a nostalgic daydream of 1960s London to a nightmare of disillusion. At any rate, his musical stab at post-#MeToo horror is highly entertaining and original. In fact, it is more original than you would expect from a genre movie that is so enchanted by other genres and undergoes a transformation according to which genre Wright is referencing at the given moment. That transformation is always complete. The stylisation changes along with the heroine’s motivation, goal and place in the narrative. A comedic fish-out-of-water drama in a university setting first becomes an observational movie of someone’s glittering life in swinging London and then an amateur (giallo) detective flick that continually slips into a ghost/zombie/splatter horror movie or a claustrophobic psycho-thriller along the lines of Polanski’s Repulsion. Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns managed to incorporate into the story a warning against idealising the past (or rather the attempt to interpret it according to today’s values) somewhat more elegantly than the motif of trauma imprinted on bodies and places. However, I definitely do not think that, with respect to its bold stylisation, the film stigmatises mental illness and sex work, as some foreign reviews accuse it of doing. It is a stylish genre mishmash. It may not work perfectly, but I enjoyed it from the opening to the closing credits. 80%. (02/11/2021)