Last Night In Soho is…. a fine movie.
It is relatively inoffensive. It’s playful, the Swinging Sixties sequences look absolutely gorgeous. Wright’s directing style and editing choice are fast-paced and fun, expertly put to a banging soundtrack, as always.
But it is not… good.
With such a prominent cast of Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, and Sixties staples Diana Rigg and Rita Tushingham, one would think you were in for something energetic and showstopping.
As my friend said as we emerged from the cinema door, after we’d spent the past two hours laughing loudly and making snide remarks in a very sparsely filled cinema, ‘That’s a movie teenage girls are going to love.’ And she absolutely summed it up.
It looks lovely, and sounds lovely, but there’s nothing really… there?
It’s always nice to see a film with a female lead. It’s strange that sometimes to me it still feels like a novelty. But Ellie unfortunately falls flat. She lacks any real depth, beyond gawky, a little awkward and very much ‘not like other girls.’ She’s clearly haunted beneath her plucky exterior and I think Thomasin McKenzie plays the unhinged obsessive very well in later parts of the film.
It doesn’t help that she speaks in an incredibly thick West Country accent throughout, which is, at its least, mildly grating, and at its most, renders her dialogue almost incomprehensible. It would have been fine had they cast an actor actually from the West Country.
But she’s from NEW ZEALAND.
It just felt like such an unnecessary detail, other than perhaps to amplify her role as ‘fish out of water country girl’ in London. And, much like a single English accent amongst American ones, it renders her performance somewhat hard to suspend belief for.
A lot of the other performances are pretty unremarkable too. Anya Taylor-Joy once again played the cold, uncompromising, and aloof beauty. I thought this was her type-cast because she had that elfin, ethereal look that could pull it off. But I think the reality is, she just can’t act with any real emotion. Her role as troubled aspiring dancer Sandy is probably the liveliest role I’ve ever seen her in and she was still massively emotionally vapid. She looked fantastic though.
Matt Smith… was fine. He’s become gifted at playing unsavoury characters since his Doctor Who days in the early 2010s, but unfortunately, they slapped the most horrendous East End accent on him, which just comes off as incredibly distracting and unintentionally cheesy.
Jocasta, Ellie’s frenemy was perhaps the saving grace. Played by Synnøve Karlsen, she is cutting and absolutely hilarious in a satirical (I hope) poke at the Gen Z Mean Girl. Though the narrative attempts to vilify her, I just couldn’t help laughing out loud every time she delivered another harsh, witty quip at Ellie. She was far, far more lovable than our protagonist. I really wished she was the main character, you could tell that the writers had a lot of fun with her dialogue.
It frustrated me that there were some really funny, quick moments and then others that were so laboured and ham-fisted it felt like a chore to sit through. At parts, it felt almost like glimpses of Wright's other classics like Shaun of the Dead were poking through, before a more corporate and tedious film fell back over the top.
Of course, Wright co-wrote this film with Krysty Wilson-Cairns and thus, the comedic touch of long-time collaborators Nick Frost and Simon Pegg was missing. Perhaps that was what I was searching for?
There was just something almost soulless about Last Night in Soho that I couldn’t get past. It sorely misses the offbeat charm that it sacrifices in exchange for flashy Hollywood-esque visuals and glamour. The plot ties up neatly despite randomly coasting off at points and remains surprising, if not a little corny. It’s all very cosy and satisfying - but perhaps TOO neat?
Wright’s directing style fits the ostentatious hedonism of the Swing Sixties so well, and I would really love to see him tackle another film set in this era because his direction captures vitality and excitement so so well. But it was not a horror; it was an energetic thriller at best.
The dancing scenes were my real favourite. Wright encapsulates perfectly the sensation of losing oneself to music and feeling yourself become the centre of the world. The sequence of Sandy slowly accepting the terms of her stardom in the dingy underground club is haunting and a surprising pleasure to watch. There’s a very clever scene early on between Smith, Taylor-Joy, and McKenzie in an intimate three-person dance, and a fantastically atmospheric nightclub scene featuring strobe lighting and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Happy House’ in modern Soho.
All in all, Last Night in Soho did, unfortunately, disappoint me. I think there are some gorgeous set pieces and all the 1960s sections are far more engaging than Ellie’s storyline in the present. The cinematography cleverly propels the storyline onwards and visually, it is breathtaking. But beyond that, it’s a gimmicky time travel thriller that’s had a big old corny Halloween mask slapped onto it.
If you want to look at pretty cinematography and be very vaguely entertained, Last Night in Soho is not one to avoid. In fact, there are far worse ways you can spend two hours.
This is only if, however, you can sit through stretches of laborious melodrama and a generally vapid attempt of a thrill that falls flat of Wright’s previous masterpieces.