Edgar Wright checks all the right boxes in his unimaginative horror musical.
Movie nerd Edgar Wright shifts his usual lad humor to girl-power mode with Last Night in Soho. Suburban girl Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) goes to study fashion design at the University of Arts in London where a time-shifting obsession with Sixties pop culture and her family’s troubled emotional history cause a crack-up. It’s another Promising Young Woman — yikes!
Buffs who recall the Sixties female buddy movie Smashing Time that starred Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham (the latter plays Eloise’s fond grandmother) will notice Wright’s deliberate pop-culture reference. They’ll also recognize how naïve Ellie’s stress conjures an alter ego — showbiz aspirant Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) — whose sexual panic references Repulsion, Roman Polanski’s horror film about Swinging London’s frightening underside.
This musical-horror-comedy puts Wright outside his geek wheelhouse. It’s possible that young women respond to pop culture differently than boys do (Ellie’s fashion mania doesn’t correspond to her British pop-records crush) so that her isolation from college mean girls just seems contrived. Instead of probing Ellie’s eccentricity, Wright marks boxes on Focus Features’ feminist checklist: She’s suspicious of men’s advances. She befriends a black gay male classmate (“I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t belong”). And after leaving the girls’ dorm, the rented bedsit in which she hallucinates is ostentatiously pink.
Wright labors to make this genre mash-up dazzling when Ellie fantasizes a massage parlor that was formerly the Rialto nightclub. That’s where Sandie emerges amid split-mirror reflections and several dance numbers and stage performances, carefully choreographed as in Wright’s Baby Driver but even more wrongheaded. Wright, unlike his colleague Tarantino, has less than great taste in popular music. He uses dreadful Sixties cover versions, which means his evocation of Sandie Shaw, Cilla Black, and Petula Clark doesn’t resonate.
This nonserious re-creation of the Sixties (featuring a widescreen, Technicolor marquee of Thunderball) is shallow, without the emotional authenticity of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Taylor-Joy’s wannabe vixen has a hard demeanor unlike that of actual Sixties types Julie Christie, Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, and Carol White — a film geek should ace these things even more than Carnaby Street fashions. Plus, there’s a bizarre stage act in which Marionetta (Jeanie Wishes), resembling Britney Spears, mimes a wind-up sex toy. Wright’s misconception of Sixties sexual liberation and Nineties sexual calculation is so off that it makes you wonder what music-video wiz Joseph Kahn would have done with this material instead. (Maybe a version of Elton John’s Soho song “All the Young Girls Love Alice.”)
In the same way that Baby Driver wore itself out (Wright’s overswing swept past the romantic coming-of-age splendor of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva that he unconsciously imitated), Last Night in Soho exaggerates the macabre erotic undercurrents of Repulsion, Die, Die, My Darling!, and even the slashings of Dressed to Kill. Wright’s antic sense of humor made Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim exuberant, but he can’t do mystery-suspense, so he winds up inadvertently making venerable Sixties icons Tushingham, Terence Stamp, and Diana Rigg monstrous.
A Millennial girl’s picture is not the same as what used to be called a “woman’s picture” (one that emphasized female desire and aspiration). Wright’s co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns proves as unhelpful as Phoebe Waller-Bridge was on No Time to Die; token female input doesn’t help stretch Wright’s talent or sensitivity to issues of female sexuality, and he never rectifies the fear that makes feminists see all men as threatening. (Wright depicts Sandie’s numerous, anonymous johns as the faceless mob of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s erotic thriller The Face of Another.)
It’s unimaginative to subject the token black gay friend (Michael Ajao) to the same sacrificial hacking as in Kubrick’s The Shining, yet everything about Wright’s checklist filmmaking is unsatisfying. Trying to make both a pop-culture jamboree and an exposé of female exploitation means Last Night in Soho is diversity gone mad.
