Last Night in Soho
Last Night in Soho is visually stunning, but Edgar Wright's thriller can't hide its weak script and telegraphed twists.
The distinction between a psychological thriller and a supernatural horror film is not a pedantic one. It determines what the audience is actually watching for. A psychological thriller, at its best, keeps you inside a character's deteriorating perception of reality and withholds the question of what is real for as long as it can sustain the tension. Gone Girl is a clean example: the audience is in Amy's head, invested in her psychology, uncertain about the ground beneath them. Supernatural horror works differently. The threat is external and eventually concrete, the ghost is a ghost, the demon is a demon, and the horror comes from confrontation rather than uncertainty. Mixing these two modes is not impossible, but it requires a screenplay precise enough to earn both registers at once. Last Night in Soho does not have that screenplay, and the mismatch between what the film is marketed as and what it actually is turns out to be its central and irrecoverable problem.
Edgar Wright is a director with genuine technical gifts and a track record that warrants the benefit of the doubt. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Baby Driver are films made by someone who understands visual rhythm and genre mechanics at a level most working directors do not. Last Night in Soho arrives as his most overtly ambitious film in terms of tone, and for stretches of it that ambition is visible in every frame. The ambition just runs considerably ahead of the script.
Ellie Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) is a fashion student from Cornwall who moves to London to attend design school, only to find the city alienating and her dormitory intolerable. She rents a room in an older boarding house run by Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg) and begins experiencing vivid dreams set in 1960s Soho in which she inhabits the life of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer being guided into the club scene by a man named Jack (Matt Smith). The dreams grow progressively darker as Sandie's story does, and Ellie becomes convinced that something violent happened to Sandie decades ago that the present somehow needs to reckon with. Terence Stamp and Michael Ajao also star.
The film establishes within its first ten minutes that Ellie can see and communicate with ghosts, that this ability is known to people in her life, and that it is not something the story intends to complicate or question. To be clear about why that matters: a film that gives the audience that information upfront is a supernatural horror film, not a psychological thriller. The framing shapes how you watch. Once the audience knows the rules, it stops looking for cracks in the character's perception and starts looking for where the plot is heading, and Last Night in Soho is not built to withstand that kind of scrutiny. The thriller mechanics are telegraphed to a degree that is genuinely difficult to defend. Certain characters are given only a first name. Others only a last name. A handful are given none at all. If you have seen any mystery film before this one, you will have the climax assembled well before the film intends to reveal it, and then you will spend the second half watching the movie catch up to a conclusion you reached an hour earlier.
What makes this frustrating rather than simply dismissible is that Wright surrounds a weak screenplay with craft that is, in places, exceptional. The production design and costuming for the 1960s Soho sequences is detailed and immersive in a way that justifies the film's visual ambition entirely. The sound design and audio mix are doing serious work throughout, using period music and spatial audio to create a texture that the plot does not always earn. The sequence in which Ellie and Sandie begin swapping places during a dance floor scene is technically as impressive as anything Wright has put on screen, a genuinely disorienting visual effect executed with the kind of precision that reminds you who is behind the camera. The cast brings more to their roles than the material warrants. McKenzie is committed and grounded. Taylor-Joy's Sandie is vivid enough in her early scenes that the film's failure to fully develop her is the most acutely felt loss in the screenplay.
It is like watching someone spend a day and a half on elaborate decoration and then apply it to something that cannot support the weight. The surface is striking, the structure beneath it is not. There are plot threads introduced in the first act, including implications around Ellie's mother's death, that the film raises with apparent intent and then simply abandons. Questions that the second half invites go unanswered not because the film is being deliberately elliptical, but because it does not seem to notice they are there.
Last Night in Soho is worth seeing eventually, but the theatrical experience is not where it pays off. The visual and audio work benefit from a good screen, but nothing in the story gives you a reason to prioritize it over anything else in a given weekend. Wait for streaming, watch it for Wright and for Taylor-Joy, and manage your expectations around the script accordingly. Hopefully whatever Wright turns his attention to next gives his considerable technical abilities a story that can carry them.
