Last Night in Soho (2021)
Review of Last Night in Soho, directed by Edgar Wright
I remember when this movie first came out, and I was planning to see it in theaters. Yeah, well, that never happened and so I procrastinated on it even longer, until one night in December 2022 I was really bored and was looking through HBO Max for something to watch.
In that moment when I saw Last Night in Soho had been added and I had nothing else better to do, I pressed play, pulled the blankets around me a bit tighter, and decided it was time to sit down and watch it. It was perfect timing too since I was on a kick for Anya Taylor-Joy after seeing her in The Menu, and, as always, she does not disappoint.
Let’s begin the review.
A young fashion student gets caught up in the past of 1960s London and its dark side.
Last Night in Soho begins in the present moment, when a new graduate named Eloise (who begins to go by Ellie with her peers) has a dream of becoming a fashion designer. She lives with her grandmother and is packing up to attend college at the London College of Fashion, and despite not living in London before now, she’s awfully excited to go out and start her journey as a designer.
She’s plagued by a terrible past in the process: when she was a kid, her mother, also a designer, ended up killing herself. We don’t know what happened to her father, but that doesn’t matter—this is a movie about women largely. The men in people’s lives romantically don’t tend to go in a direction that leans in the archetype of “loving father.”
But when Ellie arrives at the dorms in London, she finds herself an outsider immediately. The other students want to go out and party, having fun in London’s club and bar scene, and her roommate brings home guys to have sex with while Ellie is on the other side of the small room.
Needless to say, Ellie doesn’t make friends with other people very easily in this new environment, except for one other student, John, who seems more friendly than the rest. Discouraged, Ellie moves out of the dorms without telling her grandmother and tries to live in an elderly woman’s spare room.
It’s in that room where Ellie begins to have dreams that she’s in the body of someone from the sixties: Sandie. Sandie dresses well and exudes the definition of confidence, which brings her to the cafes in the area to inquire about singing there.
After meeting a manager at one of them named Jack, he promises her that he will get her a job and they end up having sex. We don’t realize until that moment that Ellie was in Sadie’s body, as when Ellie wakes up after that dream, she has a love bite on her neck.
It’s after that moment, too, that Ellie decides to become more like Sandie. She starts designing dresses based on Sandie’s attire during the dreams, hits up the vintage stores for sixties clothing, and cuts her hair to look more like Sandie. Because this lifestyle is more expensive, she gets a job at an Irish pub, but meets a man who seems to know who Sandie was in the past.
This turns out to be a boon and a bane, because when Ellie discovers that Jack basically turned her into a prostitute in the sixties and took advantage of the poor girl, crushing her dreams in the process, she suspects the elderly man is Jack.
As it turns out, Sandie killed Jack and all the men who hurt her in the past, and the woman Ellie has been staying with is Sandie. In a violent, fulfilling ending scene, the house burns down, John gets stabbed by Sandie, and Ellie ends up discovering her own identity.
I think one of the major themes I took away from this movie is finding your own identity, because if Ellie had blindly followed in Sandie’s path and literally tried to become like her, it would not have ended well. Sandie is the epitome of everything Ellie wanted to be on a superficial level, but fell victim to her own ambition and the patriarchal standards of the time.
The sixties in London in such a vibrant time, and I think Wright does a pretty decent job of capturing an essence of the era on the screen. Is it perfect? No, but what film is ever truly perfect at capturing the memories of something people lived through without slightly romanticizing it? Ellie isn’t unique though for trying to capture the spirit of that era in her designs.
As someone who went to fashion school in New York City and hung around a lot of fashion designers, I think a lot of talent right now is looking to the past and seeing how they can emulate and bring back elements from long-gone eras. No one really judged them for it, making Ellie’s classmates a group of judgmental girls who have nothing better to do.
Honestly, I could watch an entire movie with just the fashion school experience, but these characters would have needed to be fleshed out more.
From a feminist lens, I can see how this movie could be both empowering and problematic. The contemporary heroines are pushed back in favor of someone from the past, making them “less free” than a woman from the sixties. Sandie is shown to have more agency than the girls of the present by rejecting the nature of her circumstances through violence, although in the present she refuses to atone for her sins. It’s a classic revenge story in the vein of Park Chan-wook, but the movie is trying to also do too much in such a short amount of time.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a good movie, but not a great one. I think the time traveling elements are done well in a way that it doesn’t feel too forced, and the performances from both lead actresses are pretty good as well.
My problems with the movie stem with the fact that I don’t think the hybrid nature works as well as it could have, and the focus feels uneven.
Ellie’s former roommates at the college all fall under the archetypes of the mean girls and kind of get a shaft to the side, kind of showing this cruelty about how people are in the world and fail to support other women, just like how Sandie was thrown into her situation by someone she trusted. I think there’s quite a bit to ponder with this movie and that I’ll be grappling with it for awhile, honestly.
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