Year of Release: 2021
Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Diana Rigg, Terence Stamp, Michael Ajao, Synnove Karlsen, Jessie Mei Li, Sam Claflin, Rita Tushingham, Colin Mace
Genre: Drama, Mystery
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 5
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Synopsis and Review
Celebrated writer/director Edgar Wright is back, following his latest endeavors, which has included "Baby Driver" and the documentary "The Sparks Brothers". The film focuses its narrative on Ellie Turner, a young woman who is about to go to college in London to study fashion design. She's been raised by her grandmother, following her mom's suicide when she was a young girl. Upon arriving in London, she sparks the attention of a fellow student by the name of John, but the other students in her dorm, turn out not to truly gel with her. She decides to find another place to live, which she does when she decides to rent a room run by the elderly Ms. Collins. She also finds a part time job in order to cover her expenses in the city. Ellie starts having some vivid dreams, where she's transported back to the 60s, and where she experiences life through the eyes of a beautiful young woman by the name of Sandie. These vivid dreams become more recurring, and in them she witnesses the life of Sandie evolving, including her relationship with her abusive manager Jack. Sandie wants to become a singer, but soon her manager starts passing her out very much like a prostitute. Ellie in the meantime starts blurring her reality with her dreams, dying her hair, changing her style, but also viewing some menacing apparitions which resemble Jack. When Sandie is killed in yet another of her dreams, Ellie decides to investigate further, eventually going to the police to report what's going on.
Edgar Wright is one of the most interesting directors working these days, though I personally wasn't a fan of "Baby Driver", and "Last Night in Soho" itself, while being an interesting attempt at building a different style of thriller, it also fails to deliver something that is actually resonating. Most of the issues with the narrative stem from the fact that Ellie's sudden intrusion of those vivid dreams and that female character who also mysteriously pops up, is never quite clarified what their roles are and what is prompting them. Sandie initially suggests herself to be a self-assured and confident alter-ego for the shy and meek Ellie, but suddenly the narrative takes an inflection and becomes a murky murder investigation, and eventually something akin to "The Sixth Sense". This attempt at crafting this convoluted narrative with multiple threads and this crashing of the dream world and reality is hammered throughout the film constantly, so much so, that even who these characters actually are falls into the background. Ellie who is the center of the narrative, feels very much under-developed from where she starts, to where she finds herself by the end of the arc the film takes her on. Aside from the trauma of what happened in her childhood, and her close relationship with her grandmother, we never get to know much about her, or for that matter Sandie. And though not every film and every character has to have an arc, it's nonetheless interesting to understand motivations and journeys the characters go through (in this case Ellie becomes a vessel for those vivid dreams and that's it). The film has all the ingredients to be an interesting one, but sadly the narrative and its structure never quite gel. The cast is uniformly great, and they try their best to keep everything interesting, including Dame Diana Rigg, Terence Stamp and the leads, Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy. The cinematography from Chung-hoon Chung is impeccable, as is the production design from Marcus Rowland and costumes from Odile Dicks-Mireaux. A missed opportunity from an interesting director.
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