Review by Zach Dennis
Edgar Wright has always flirted with horror, but Last Night in Soho might be his first fully-fledged horror film. For a guy known for laughs, this probably could’ve used some.
Following young fashion student Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) as she leaves her small town to attend school in London, the new student quickly realizes that the city is vastly different from her small farm town. Electing to leave the student dorms for another apartment in Soho, she begins to have sleeping visions of Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), a previous tenet of her loft who attempted to be a singer with the help of Jack (Matt Smith).
As the visions become more persistent – and even begin to appear as apparitions when she isn’t sleeping – Eloise becomes more unhinged and feels as if the vision of Sandy is coming to overtake her.
Wright is evoking psychological horrors of the 1960s and 1970s such as Don’t Look Now or Possession, but where those have a cutting bite, Last Night in Soho just constantly feels like something going through the motion with no real directive. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the film – you get your usual Edgar Wright needle drops, the camerawork is compelling, and the lead performances by Taylor-Joy and McKenzie are good – but in hindsight, I can’t say it was a movie that lingers. Even now, I’m struggling to come up with what exactly happened beat by beat, and I doubt a few months from now, I’ll remember much from the film.
Anya Taylor-Joy in ‘Last Night in Soho’
Wright has previously succeeded with finding some satire in his genre exercises, but this one never feels like it had a foundation. We aren’t even afforded enough time to really luxuriate in the 1960's Soho London decor of the clubs and venues that Sandy works at as Wright shifts from those visions of her life into the ones of horror pretty quickly.
It almost feels like Wright loses his own personality in the film, electing to really zero-in on the elements he loved from those films he’s evoking but forgetting to put his own touch on them. It might actually be impossible to guess this was an Edgar Wright film if it were left uncredited.
More than his visual flair, Wright is good at playing against expectations for the genre and eliciting some humor out of that. Think of how he plays with the police procedural in Hot Fuzz or the zombie apocalypse in Shaun of the Dead. Here, it seems like he almost wanted to make a straight psychological horror without infusing any of the elements that make him interesting or worth watching.
Between this and Baby Driver, it seems like Wright has begun to stray away from his past success. With his last two films, he attempts to present more straightforward genre exercises rather than satirical riffs on them. While he does have more original ideas, it seems in line with the methodology employed by Marvel (give them a familiar genre but insert a superhero to spice it up).
I won’t say that he should call Nick Frost and Simon Pegg up just yet for another Cornetto film, but I hope Last Night in Soho isn’t a precursor for the future of Edgar Wright so we can get more high-quality work from the director who provided some of the most well-defined comedies of the past decade.