Last Night in Soho (2021)

I don't know the last time that I was looking forward to a film quite as much as I was looking forward to Last Night in Soho. I have been waiting to see this film since last October but the pandemic kept pushing it back and for a long time I was looking forward to this and No Time to Die to the most. The set up of the film is that Eloise (Thomasin Mackenzie) travels from her home that she shares with her Gran to attend a fashion school in London but after spending one night with her nightmare dorm mates she takes up lodgings with Ms Collins played by the late great Diana Rigg. She soon starts seeing events involving Sandie from the 1960’s who is trying to become a singer but soon becomes involved with Jack (Matt Smith) and we see Sandie being ‘killed’ and the film is Eloise trying to get justice for Sandie as she seemingly starts to lose her mind.

I really love this film. Firstly, the performances are really good. Anya Taylor Joy and Thomasin McKenzie are really good and are complete contrasts of each other. Joy’s Sandie is a confident and ambitious person whilst McKenzie’s Eloise is shy and always seems like she is fighting to stay in control of what she is seeing. Matt Smith is really good as Jack. He starts off as a charming guy who can make things happen but very quickly shows his true colours and basically becomes a pimp. Terence Stamp I think has a slightly underwritten role but manages to make his character seem just as unlikeable as Jack. For a long time I honestly thought that Stamp and Smith were playing the same character. I think this might be because of how the trailers made it seem but in reality Stamp’s character was the cop that we saw in one particular flashback. Michael Ajao is very good as John who becomes Eloise’s love interest and always seems to want to help her and even when she freaks out when they are about to make out he is still trying to help her. I thought that it was a lovely performance from him. Perhaps the single best performance comes from Diana Rigg who at first seems like she is just the cranky landlady but in the final act the films reveals that she is in fact Sandie and the blood that we saw wasn't from Sandie but in fact from Jack which I genuinely didn't see any of that coming and to be honest I wouldn't have tried to work it out cause I was just enjoying what I was seeing and all the great visuals that cinematographer Jeong Jeong-hun who worked on stuff like Oldboy and the first IT film. He makes this film work and if it weren't for the great visuals then the film would have failed miserably. Diana Rigg goes out in style with a performance that might have only mae sense in the final 20 minutes but it was bloody good. The last shot of her is in a burning room and she is sitting on the end of the bed and it just a great visual and its obvious why she doesn't feature too much in the promotional material because it would have ruined the twist.

The things that dont quite work are the gang of classmates that seem to exist purely to snigger at Eloise for being slightly different to them. The night when there is the party in the dorm and she decides to move out is exactly what I would have done. The characters don't really contribute to anything although Jocasta was by far the worst. Also at the end the film decides that she can just resume her career with no apparent repercussions for nearly stabbing Jocasta with some scissors but these are minor things because everything else is amazing in this film. Some might think that the film is style over substance then I think they are missing a lot from this film. It’s not the best Edgar Wright film because its not better than Hot Fuzz but its a damn good second best and shows that Edgar Wright is more than just flashy cut scenes and transitions.