LAST NIGHT IN SOHO
Edgar Wright shows his dark side…
DIRECTOR Edgar Wright STARRING Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham
“The idea for the movie is the result of 25 years of living and working in Soho,” says Edgar Wright of his sixth feature. “I spent so much time looking at the architecture, thinking, ‘What have these walls seen?’ And walking the streets late at night. Soho’s become a lot more gentrified, but it still has that darkness just under the surface. It’s one of those places where you only need to stand still for 60 seconds for something strange or magical or weird or dark to happen.”
As far as plot is concerned, Wright, always conscious of viewer enjoyment, wishes to say as little as possible. So let’s just leave it at the barest of outlines: in 2019, Eloise (McKenzie), a young woman from the country, arrives in
London to pursue her passion for fashion design. Things don’t go great. Meanwhile, in 1965, singer Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy) similarly discovers that the big city’s supposedly gold-paved streets are riven with cracks that can swallow you whole.
Wright has been mulling Last Night In Soho for a long time, and first mentioned it aloud to friends in 2013. He then amassed five years’ worth of research, including lots of interviews with “people that were pertinent to the plot”. One of the friends he told about it was screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (Penny Dreadful, 1917), and when Wright finally settled down to pen the screenplay, he invited her to co-write. It was a smart decision given she could bring a female perspective to a movie about two young women, and she’d lived above Sunset Strip on Soho’s Dean Street for many years, and worked in the Toucan pub.
It will come as no surprise that Wright watched many, many movies to get into the headspace required. “Beatles, James Bond, The Avengers, Twiggy on Carnaby Street – that’s the stuff that endures, the zeitgeisty stuff,” he says of Last Night In Soho’s ’60s strand. “But then obviously the reality of it is the darker side. I started watching a lot of these cautionary tale movies. As, I guess, almost a pushback to women’s liberation, you’d have a lot of films, mostly written by men, that sort of put people in their place. There would be a girl coming to London and it’s ‘The Big City Could Destroy You!’ There are tons and tons of movies like that, some good and some very moralistic or sensationalistic. Watching these movies started to really crystallise the idea. Like, what if the movie is that story twice, in two different periods?”
Two times the thrills, twice the dread? Count us twice as excited.
ETA I 23 APRIL 2021