Last Night in Soho (2021)

I don't enjoy every one of Christopher Nolan's films. Denis Villeneuve has made one or two that don't thrill me. I could take or leave some of Bong Joon-ho's films. But Edgar Wright has yet to make a film I don't love. Last Night in Soho didn't break that streak. So you can keep your Robert Eggers, your Wes Andersons, your Ari Asters, and I'll stick with Wright every time. 

Horror is almost always about trauma in some way and Last Night in Soho follows that approach, exploring male violence and exploitation of women. It is about the ubiquity of the culture that not only forgives but expects and rewards male violence towards women. It's about the way we invite our past to haunt us and our futures. It's about mistakes and our predilection for perpetuating them. It is about why we do terrible things. And it is about forgiveness, especially as we come so close to the edge ourselves. 

Last Night in Soho is all that but it is also a truly frightening film. He pulls images that are disconcerting, aping Lynch in his willingness to provide us with disquieting imagery. Wright sets us on edge, the energy of his film leaving us breathless and unsure of what it is we are seeing so we are shaken throughout.  Yet it is, like all of Wright's films, a beautiful film. He drenches us in colour, using reflections and mirrors to widen our perspectives, play with what is real and present, and provide us a feast for our eyes in every frame. My favourite directors remember they are making something for us to watch and therefore create sights for sore eyes. They also remember to tell us compelling stories that take us away to different places, different worlds, and get us thinking about things we might not otherwise. 

Last Night in Soho turns the tables on us. For a lot of it it feels like psychological horror that we have seen before but he flips the script and then, just when we think we've got good and bad aligned and know who our villain is he flips it again and we are left in a Technicolor world of varying degrees of responsibilities, varying degrees of understandings, where we find ourselves reflecting on meeting each other in the middle. There was a moment near the end, in the climax, where I worried the story was moving in the direction of a more simplistic arc, one where villainy would be commonly executed, but Last Night in Soho swerved into something more complex and interesting and that much more satisfying. In the end it is a tragedy that paves the path for a redemptive future. 

Soho is fantasy, hyper reality, because we all experience the reality of our own experience, not a universal shared truth. There is a rich sentimentality that many may balk at, but for me was a winning feature which surrounded me in story and character, time and place, and reached the films ultimate achievement of shining hope for the future. Perhaps horror isn't supposed to be this redemptive and perhaps that will upset audiences. But for me Soho is cinema for all the reasons I enjoy seeing films on the big screen. It is the sort of film that makes me happy to be a film buff. 

Last Night in Soho

Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Diana Rigg, Terrance Stamp, Michael Ajao, Jessica Mai-Li, Rita Tushingham, Sam Claflin

Director: Edgar Wright

Writers: Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Edgar Wright