Last Night in Soho (2021)
Directed by Edgar Wright
A young girl, passionate about fashion design, is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s where she encounters her idol, a dazzling wannabe singer. But 1960s London is not what it seems, and time seems to be falling apart with shady consequences.
87 connections found
View:
87 films that influenced Last Night in Soho
What critics say influenced Last Night in Soho
Wright’s visual acuity is too good not to enjoy visual references to Mario Bava’s colorful murder set pieces in Blood and Black Lace or Roman Polanski’s claustrophobia in paranoid thriller Repulsion .
Like its "artistic" lead character toiling away at a single fastidiously recreated dress, Last Night is a movie with a lot of fluffed-up gestures and nods to past work — whether Dario Argento's Inferno, Roman Polanski's Repulsion, John Carpenter in places — but not a lot to share itself.
The film itself brims with echoes from the past: Roman Polanski’s genuinely chilling Sixties horror film Repulsion , the presence of Sixties icons Tushingham and Terence Stamp; a terrific juke box of songs.
Adding depth to the story is Ellie’s own past, which hints at mental instability and harks back to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion , about similar madness overwhelming a similarly beautiful blonde (Catherine Deneuve) in a similarly claustrophobic 1960s London.
That evokes Polanski’s “Repulsion” (1965), but the blend of troubled personalities that become a single blonde live wire also evokes Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (1966).
But he isn’t interested in only riffing on one genre: He also pays tribute to noirs, notably Roman Polanski’s psycho-thriller Repulsion, which also follows a woman who experiences frightening hallucinations rooted in a fear of men.
In many respects, Last Night in Soho is a tale of two halves, with the first part being a slow build, where Wright submerges us into the style and ambiance of the 60’s, with mirrors, feathery dresses, large billboards for Sean Connery in Thunderball , and music that is peak 1960’s London sound.
Her first nocturnal encounter shows the talented chanteuse meeting Matt Smith’s louche talent manager Jack and falling for his honey-tongued promises, while around them, Wright lovingly explores his own fandom of the era through the plush, mirrored interiors and a gargantuan, brightly lit marquee for Thunderball .
Walking through the city in her pajamas, Eloise gazes up and sees a marquee for Thunderball (1965) as the cars whiz around her; she wanders into a night club only to look in the mirror and see not herself but Sandy.
Also watch out for a few nifty nods to James Bond, with a huge Thunderball poster featured prominently, while everyone drinks the Vesper Martini created by Ian Fleming in the novel Casino Royale .
The setup is seductive, and the production design is sumptuous; Wright’s claim that he was inspired to recreate old-school Soho by the Los Angeles–plays-itself imagery of his pal Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood contextualizes the luminous beauty (and detail) of Eloise’s foray into the past, including a rapturous view of a movie theater marquee advertising Sean Connery in Thunderball .
Eloise’s naïve downhill descent into a hell of blaring horns, vomiting drunks and battered hookers wearing hideous clothes is illustrated by marquees of the James Bond movie Thunderball, interminable musical reprises of gushy, lugubrious rock tunes like “Downtown”, and violent scenes of carnage and bloodshed that have no meaning.
Wright pays homage to the king of giallo himself, Dario Argento, borrowing bold visual elements from his films like Deep Red and Suspiria (the use of knives as mirrors, a fixation on the color red).
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The protracted revival of Dario Argento’s Suspiria should be celebrated, and it’s an obvious touchpoint here, along with Deep Red and Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace .
The film’s setup should give the viewer the hopeful impression that “Soho” will mine the work and maybe the themes of director Dario Argento (see his “Deep Red” and his classic “Suspiria”).
This is Wright, so nods and references abound, with the filmmaker paying homage to the work of Mario Bava, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now , and Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street.
As always, Wright is a tad too slick: there’s a tidiness that doesn’t quite capture the flintiness of on-the-record inspirations Repulsion and Don’t Look Now .
It uses the stylish aesthetics of classic psychological horror films such as Don’t Look Now and Repulsion as a vehicle for a lecture about why the time period in which those movies were made was nothing that we should aspire to bring back, no matter how cool it may have looked on the surface.
The vivid use of colours from Argento’s Suspiria, the suspense of Don’t Look Now and Repulsion with the occasional sprinkling of Giallo/Hammer horror to measure.
Advertisement
Wright throws in references to Michael Powell’s notorious thriller Peeping Tom and to Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy among other films.
The color schemes and decors evoke Powell-Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes” (1948) and Michael Powell’s London terror “Peeping Tom” (1960): so much movie madness in the Big Smoke.
It’s billed as a Swinging Sixties-influenced psychological horror in the vein of Repulsion, Peeping Tom and Vertigo, but don’t let that fool you.
Now, he satiates his appetite for British thrillers like Peeping Tom and 70’s Italian Giallo films with his most audacious project yet.
Later on, he also imitates the lush look of Hammer Studios’ horror films as well as the seediness of that all-time great serial killer flick, Peeping Tom .
En esta reflexión sobre la lascividad de la mirada hegemónica, sobre la construcción de los personajes femeninos en el cine de horror, sobre lo que separa a víctimas de victimarios, Wright regresa a los viejos problemas planteados por Peeping Tom (1960) de Michael Powell y, sesenta años después, les da un contexto dolorosamente contemporáneo.
Yet its power to enchant and enthrall flips once the rose-tinted filter is removed, a theme Wright (who co-wrote the screenplay with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) judiciously develops here, neatly echoing the idea Woody Allen cogently explored in 2011’s Midnight in Paris .
One spoiler can be allowed because the film's trailers highlight it: "Last Night in Soho" initially echoes Woody Allen's nostalgic time-travel yarn "Midnight in Paris" before slowly spiraling into a Dario Argento horrorfest.
Last Night in Soho recalls Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, in which a young man goes to a big city and begins seeing the ghosts of the era of that city that he idealized most—soon to discover that the past wasn't all that perfect.
Taking his title from a 1960s song with the lyrics, “Last night in Soho I let my life go,” Wright and his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns draw inspiration from playful music with a Midnight in Paris love for nostalgia.
There is more—much more—but in essence, “Last Night in Soho” suggests what would result if someone elected to take Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and reconceived it as a blood-soaked vehicle for the likes of Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci—the restaurant next door may be technically French but the vivid red and blue hues that it fills Ellie’s room with are pure Italian giallo.
Even coming into the film fully knowing it’s horror, you become convinced early on that it’s actually a warm, escapist ode to another time, like “Midnight in Paris.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The protracted revival of Dario Argento’s Suspiria should be celebrated, and it’s an obvious touchpoint here, along with Deep Red and Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace .
Wright’s visual acuity is too good not to enjoy visual references to Mario Bava’s colorful murder set pieces in Blood and Black Lace or Roman Polanski’s claustrophobia in paranoid thriller Repulsion .
Last Night in Soho isn’t a pastiche of any one cinematic style, but in addition to the debt it owes to giallo classics like Suspiria or Blood and Black Lace , it couldn’t exist without Martin Scorsese’s After Hours , another psychological comedy-thriller in which an innocent outsider gets caught up in the secret nocturnal life of a great world city.
While Soho remains a feast for the senses until the very end, framing ongoing sexual violence in such an exploitative fashion risks superficiality, even when he’s consciously evoking giallo, particularly Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace.
Like a gorgeous melody that drifts almost imperceptibly off key before descending into screaming discord, so Last Night in Soho slips seamlessly between harmony and dissonance, with nods to Julie Christie in Darling mutating into evocations of Jessica Harper in Suspiria .
It’s a weird premise that combines the psychological thriller, time-travel, and—eventually—giallo horror genres (think 1977’s Suspiria).
DP Chung Chung-hoon is the real star, conjuring the essence of giallo beauty, like Argento’s Suspiria (1977), and concocting the most invasive neon lights since Frank Biberkopf’s apartment in Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).
Advertisement
Some of the cultural references might be a little on the nose – posters for Sweet Charity and Breakfast At Tiffany’s are clear signposts towards the seedier aspects of swinging Soho – but that hardly matters.
She assumes that she will naturally fit in, that the college might be full of eccentrics like her, and that the city might be a magical place like the one she’s often dreamed about in her small room, covered in posters for films like Sweet Charity and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and images of long-dead pop stars.
An old soul, Eloise bedecks her teenage bedroom in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Sweet Charity (1969) movie posters, and, when packing for university, stuffs her suitcase with Cilla Black and the Searchers LPs, almost forgetting to bring socks alongside all her Sixties memorabilia.
From her vinyl collection featuring Cilla Black, her bedroom posters featuring Sweet Charity and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast in Tiffany’s, to its use of John Barry’s ‘ Beat Girl’ , it all culminates into a sweeping 360-degree payoff reveal when she’s transported to her 60s dreamscape, and James Bond’s Thunderball lights up the London skyline.
David Lynch examines similar themes of manufactured and shuffled individuality, and female-female obsession, in “Mulholland Drive.”
McKenzie and Taylor-Joy, two of their generation's most promising actresses, make a very intriguing pair, and the yin and yang of their story suggest a time-separated twist on "Mulholland Drive."
Wright craves the gnomic privileges available to David Lynch (whose Mulholland Drive is another influence) but he is also trying to make a crowd-pleaser, not realising that the two are mutually exclusive.
McKenzie and Taylor-Joy might be the sexiest female pairing since Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive or, delving even deeper, Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot in Les Pétroleuses (The Petroleum Girls).
That isn’t a problem in itself, if you consider, say, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. as a model: The first half of that picture is a dream you don’t want to wake up from; the second half is the nightmare price you pay for buying the dream, but it too is an opiate reverie, and it provides context for all that came before it.
¿Es Última noche en el Soho una relectura (muy British) de Mulholland Drive (2001)?