Voyeuristic thrills in Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho”

Anya-Taylor Joy appears about 20 minutes into Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho” as the savvy and confident Sandy. She is both a foil, and a mirror, for our more impressionable heroine – Eloise. Sandy waltzes into a London Club sometime in the 1960s, the image of glamour and confidence. A waiter appears and enquires about her partner. There is none. He is momentarily thrown. “Oh, so madame is alone?” She smiles demurely, “I am.” By the end of the film, those two words feel much more significant and mocking than the cavalier line-reading suggests.

Although Eloise and Sandy feel joined across space and time, “Last Night in Soho” is centrally about aloneness. Specifically, the aloneness of the voyeur – forever watching. It is about the joys of luxuriating in the ephemera of a mood, a time, a period that is exciting for that temporariness. It’s seductive, but it’s also frustrating. If Wright’s latest film, the first explicitly about women, feels like a swerve from his usual filmography in some ways it still retains his typical preoccupations with stylistic flourishes, sound-design that borders on adversarial and a thematic outlook on its main characters that centres a warm innocence that is out of place with the worst of the world.

There’s a telling note of insouciance tied to the very last shot, for example. It’s not quite a “resolution” in the narrative, but evokes a note of casualness that made me chuckle at its irreverence. It’s unsurprising that this moment, a natural progression of the film’s increasingly chaotic last quarter, might be a note of frustration for some audiences and critics but I found myself more charmed than repelled by the needling carelessness. It feels, in a way, key to reading “Last Night in Soho” which is a story playing around with a few variations on itself.

Wright is infatuated with the contours of play and playacting. Performance and costume are central to those antics. The opening sequence is a delightful testament to this. A young woman strikes a pose in the doorway of a darkened hall as Peter & Gordon’s “A World Without Love” plays. You might be forgiven for thinking we are in the sixties but we are in the present. And this is Eloise (a querulously effective Thomasin McKenzie), prospective fashion student and sixties obsessive, who is lustily dreaming of yesteryear while on her way to university in London to study fashion.

Early on, an apparition in the mirror – a presence Eloise pointedly denies to her grandmother – suggests something sinister to come. The vision is her mother, dead from suicide a decade earlier. For the first twenty minutes, though, the apparition is only passingly significant and “Last Night in Soho” situates itself in the realm of collegial drama – a misfit country girl in London, struggling to fit in. If you’ve seen the trailer, or the ad campaign, you’re likely waiting for the moment when time ruptures and the present bleeds into the past, but Wright surprisingly manages a genuinely amusing riff on college life before the story properly gets underway – aided by a cast of young actors incredibly keyed into the banality of university life and more thoughtful about their potentially broad-stroke characters. Things really get to work, though, when Eloise moves in as a lodger with an older woman (Diana Rigg, charming and opaque). On her first night there, Eloise has a vivid dream that transports her to 1960s Soho, where she seems to reliving the experiences of Sandy, a confident aspiring singer. Eloise seems to be Sandy, but also seems to be watching Sandy and from there things get loopier.

In the present, Eloise is still struggling to adapt to school and losing her grip on reality as she becomes increasingly vulnerable to her dreams – first one of Sandy’s love-bites shows up on Eloise’s neck, then waking visions suggest that Sandy is haunting her in the present and in what feels like a climax in the past Eloise witnesses a fatal act of violence that seems unresolved. Plot details, I would argue, are nebulous. Edgar Wright has confessed that part of his interest in “Last Night in Soho” was in trying to demystify the nostalgia for the past. “Hear ye, hear ye. Incessant nostalgia for the past can be dangerous.” It is an apt observation, perhaps, as the last few weeks of cinema have seen yet another round of remakes and sequels to films that feel more concerned with ghosts of the past than anything new. But Wright’s interest is more complex than “nostalgia is bad”, because it’s critical in “Last Night in Soho” that Eloise is not struck by nostalgia. She has never lived in the sixties, so her nostalgic longings are displaced vicarious inheritances from her grandmother. She says as much. What “Last Night in Soho” is doing even better is seductively speaking to the thrills and pitfalls of a lifetime of watching.

When Sandy demurely confesses her aloneness to the diffident waiter, she turns to the screen with a knowing glance and her eyes meet Eloise. We’re not quite sure what’s happening. Is Sandy, in the past, aware of the presence of Eloise from the future? Is this all a dream? What is the connection between the two? Those answers may be instructive, but those questions only defer the more central delight of Wright’s work here. Eloise’s vivid dream brings her the pleasure of a dreamscape that works like a movie screen. Mirrors and mirroring are a central motif that works like a cinema screen. In a later moment, as the delight of the past curdles into something more perverse, Eloise knocks at a screen-like mirror trying to get Sandy’s attention. But she’s only a watcher, not participant. Later, in the climactic act of violence in the past, Eloise sees this through a ceiling mirror as the past begins to luridly bleed into her waking present.

If this is a waking dream, then surely, we know that Eloise cannot be harmed by her visions? So why do we feel the fear, still? Why are we jolted by the terror of her increasingly nervous headspace? Part of it is Thomasin McKenzie, completely attuned to Eloise’s nervousness but with a sharp gumption turning this into something more complicated than mentally-ill young woman at every turn. But a lot of it is also Wright. Certainly, his script (co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) is less adept than his direction, but it’s critical that the stylistic grandiosity of the scenes in the sixties feel captivating. That they don’t seem to add up to a Very Important Theme, or that Wright seems to swerve in the final act to a kind of didactic relationship with the past and the present seems, I think, to be taking Wright’s own insouciance in ways that he’s clearly ambivalent about.

Certainly, “Last Night in Soho” is low on any truly virtuosic investigation of the concepts it might briefly consider – violence against women, toxic masculinity, ambivalent sex-work. And Wright stumbles by invoking such complex issues only to consider conceptually. The final swerves that hurtle us to our conclusion (bonus points if you pick up the context clues for two important last act revelations that are not truly unsettling, and I suspect Wright knows that) are not quite silly but they’re also not pointing to any great notion of nuance or excavation of the past. How could they though? Wright is playing dressup with the larger concepts, keyed on his usual preoccupation with artifice and the seductive nature of glamour. And the visual cues in “Last Night in Soho” are adept at this kind of sleight-of-hand. By midfilm, when Eloise dons a blonde hairdo to imitate (or in tribute to?) Sandy, we know she’s losing grips on her mental health. But, Odile Dicks-Mireaux’ costumes are sharp enough to evoke both the period and the sensibilities of Eloise might conjure of that era. Chung-hoon Chung’s camera work repeats sequences later in the film, now scarier and more menacing than our initial moments with them. The past is still seductive, but it’s also seedy. The present is familiar, but it’s also menacing.

Still, resolution is not really centred on any kind of didactic repudiation of the past. A last tender moment of a character from the past, alone in a room of nostalgic memorabilia, is achingly astute because of its refusal to make moralistic judgements. Even at its close, an escape from the worst of the past does not become a refusal to luxuriate in it. “Last Night in Soho” is weirder, and more ambivalent than “the past is terrible, don’t be tricked by it”. And it’s that ambivalence that makes it so fascinating and – probably frustrating for many. At that very end, in those final moments, a wink from a character to another is shot as if it’s a wink to us. A deliciously absurd moment that feels at odds with a moment two scenes before that seemed loaded with so much import. But, then, it’s the nature of watching. If we take care not to get too caught up in it, we can delight in its impishness. The thrill of the voyeur, amusing only if we don’t get too caught up in our watching.