Review: Passive Entertainment with Contemporary Giallo Ambitions from ‘Last Night in Soho’
“When you're alone and life is making you lonely.
You can always go... Downtown.”
Last Night in Soho begins with young Eloise (Thomasin Mackenzie) leaving the country side and heading to the city with wide-eyed ambition. After recently being accepted into London’s school of fashion, she looks forward to pursuing a career her small town could never afford her. She is greeted with bright lights and busy streets that seemingly hold infinity possibilities for her future, a future she is eager to forge and get underway. But with big cities come big changes, and not all of them are hospitable. Upon arrival, her cab driver exemplifies the type of ill-intended men who roam the streets and make lurid passes at her. Her roommates prove artificial and unfriendly to her sincere personality. And the road to her dream is probably much longer than she first realized. All of it dampens Eloise’s expectations just as she arrives, and for her, escaping as soon as she can might be an alternative to her newfound misery.
That’s when Eloise starts having out of body experiences that put her in the shoes of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a talented young singer who comes to a 1960s version of London with ambitions and dreams not unlike those of Eloise’s. At first, the glitz and glam of Sadie’s instant success, beauty, and romance compel Eloise, so much so that she longs every day to abandon real life and return to her nightly dreams in Soho. Having the life you want instantly, ideals and all, is alluring, but things are (naturally) not as they seem. Matters quickly turn sour when Sadie is exploited by an abusive partner (Matt Smith) who forces her into carrying out sexual favors for the powerful men of show businesses in order to advance her career. The nightly dreams Eloise once had turn to nightmares, and they soon start to materialize in the modern day. From there, director Edgar Wright’s latest film descends into psychological madness where past and present merge and the seediness of patriarchal institutions start to haunt Eloise.
As a film cut from the cloth of the Italian giallo, Last Night in Soho owes much of its style and plot to the films that inspired it. The strong primary color lighting that envelopes Wright’s frames can be found vividly in Dario Argento’s technicolor nightmare Suspiria. The fashion designer school backdrop can be drawn from Mario Bravo's Blood and Black Lace. And the distorted realities of the past come to life bear a resemblance to the plot of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Wright’s sensibilities largely take a back seat to these (and many more giallo film) influences, but all it takes is a needle drop that pushes pace, a rapid three shot transition, or some quick witted humor to remind you that this is still an Edgar Wright film.
One key facet of the giallo film that Wright addresses is its eroticism by way of exploitation. Seedy deaths that often involved taboos and sexually exploited female victims were a common characteristic derived from the pulp novels with which the genre got its namesake, eventually becoming a precursor to and influence on the American slasher. While such perverse exploitations may not adapt well to the modern context, the erotic elements can still stand on their own, if threaded properly. Wright bifurcates the two, reshaping the exploitation to fit the film’s contemporary message and neutralizing the erotic despite his best efforts to retain it.
In London, Eloise is often subjected to unwanted cat calls and male gazes, affirming the warning her grandmother gave her at the onset and pointing to a long-standing plight within society. These misogynistic gestures are only the beginning as Eloise starts to vicariously live through Sandie and sees the exploitation and violence she experiences from the men in show business. The embedding of sex, prostitution, and lustful desires into the narrative of the film are callbacks to the giallo, made modern by Wright’s commentary on the patriarchal control on the entertainment industry and the violence leveled at women who enter into it. At the same time, you get the sense that the film really wants to be erotic while not succumbing to pitfalls that might otherwise undermine the film’s message. The sum effect is a sterile result that comes off as neither striking nor profound, but bears some value in passive entertainment.
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