'LAST NIGHT IN SOHO' A SHOWCASE FOR YOUNG ACTORS
“Last Night in Soho” is a truly original movie that takes command of the audience from its first moments, then confidently leads that audience up and down unexpected corridors.
It’s never easy to guess where it’s going, because it pings back and forth between genres — not arbitrarily, but in a way that feels natural and inspired. At different times it’s an artist’s coming-of-age story, a happy fantasy, a psychological thriller, a horror movie and even a memory piece about the swinging ’60s.
Along the way, it becomes a strong showcase for two women, placing former child actress Thomasin Mckenzie (“Jojo Rabbit”) in the lead role, and making the best case yet for Anya Taylor-joy (“The Queen’s Gambit”) as a major star.
Directed and co-written by Edgar Wright (“Baby Driver”), “Last Night in Soho” introduces Ellie (Mckenzie), a young woman of today who dreams of becoming a clothes designer and whose mind is immersed in the mid-1960s. She is living in a small town, days before leaving for fashion school in London, and immediately we notice two things about her: She’s confident, and she might be psychologically frail.
Later, when she gets to London, we
notice something of the reverse. She’s shy and insecure, but there’s steel behind the reserve. Something in Mckenzie’s performance keeps us hovering around, wondering about her and rooting for her.
She rents a room in London from a no-nonsense old lady (Diana Rigg, in her last performance) and starts having vivid dreams every night. In these dreams, Ellie is transported to 1966 and inhabits the body of Sandie, a fabulously poised aspiring singer. Sandie is Ellie’s temperamental opposite, but they’re similar in that they both arrive in London with big dreams.
Sandie might be an illusion, or she might be the past, communicating to Ellie through dreams. Either way, the vision of
Sandie, as filtered through Ellie’s consciousness and through Taylor-joy’s performance, is arresting, an emanation of a mid- to late 1960s ideal.
Taylor-joy’s quality here, an elaboration and distillation of what we’ve seen in “Queen’s Gambit” and “Emma,” is particularly distinct. She looks like someone with an exaggerated idea about herself, perhaps a wrong idea, which she is determined to bring into being through bluff. But the bluff is itself seductive, a product of courage, dignity and will. Sandie might be a phony, but she’s a real, brave phony.
At one point, Taylor-joy sings an a cappella version of the Petula Clark hit “Downtown” that seems to contain both the movie’s eras. She holds the stage like a woman of 1966, but sings the song the way someone would in 2021.
Though audience interest in resolving the stories of both women remains intense throughout, two things keep “Last Night in Soho” from being something more than an exalted and well-executed genre movie. The first is that it repeats, at least twice too often, the same kind of scene, with Ellie running through the London streets, pursued by menacing visions of the past. (These passages are indulged at a point when the movie needs to be hurtling to the finish.)
The second is that, in the end, when all is explained, the explanation is not quite satisfying.
Still, “Last Night in Soho” is full of color and darkness, and its melange of past and present evokes one of the world’s great cities. It never lets up.