Edgar Wright’s new movie, Last Night in Soho, is an aberration in his filmography — the first time the filmmaker, long dependable (and beloved) for comedic action films that double as rewatchable hangout movies, is conspicuously trying not to have fun. Though sometimes playful, Soho is mostly a playing-it-straight psychological thriller — and makes the case that it’s maybe too soon for the director to venture out of his consistently well-received element. It’s about a sprite-like 18-year-old, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), who travels to London for fashion school at the movie’s start. She is as talented — Soho’s spirited opening sees her swiveling around her bedroom in a handmade dress constructed entirely of old newspapers — as she is sheltered and naïve. Ever since her mother, also a fashion student, died when she was 7, Eloise has lived with her grandmother (a touchingly doting Rita Tushingham) in a sleepy community in Cornwall. To make up for what appears to be friendlessness, Eloise cocoons herself in an apparently passed-down obsession with Swinging London and its various touchstones, from Cilla Black to bouffant hairdos.
Modern-day London unsurprisingly presents a rude awakening for the debilitatingly shy Eloise — not helped by an abrasive mean-girl roommate (Synnøve Karlsen) and generally more worldly classmates — that pushes her even more inward. She quickly resolves to move out of the dorms and into an untouched-since-the-’60s bedsit owned by a kindly landlady (Diana Rigg, in her last movie role). There, her introversion triples. From her first night onward, Eloise has regular dreams (or maybe, the film implies, psychic visions) in which she travels back in time to mid-1960s Soho to embody an aspiring singer and dancer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Sandie is everything Eloise isn’t: confident, glamorous, and always with the right thing to say tugging at the back of her throat. This makes Eloise want to do little besides either race home from class to nocturnally live out these fantasies or, in life, make herself over in Sandie’s likeness, chopping newly blonde hair into a Jean Shrimpton-esque mop and buying vintage coats she can’t afford. Anything is better than confronting a reality that clashes with the more hospitable make-believe version of it.
Inexorably, the dreams inspiring both Eloise’s life and work lose their sparkle. What at one time seemed to be good fortune curdles when Sandie is forced into sex work by the deceitfully charming manager she hires to guide her career (Matt Smith, written so insubstantially that he seems less a person and more an indistinct ghoul). Last Night in Soho predictably doesn’t reveal how exactly these ‘60s throwbacks fit into the present-day until its finale. Until then, we’re left to wonder if Eloise is merely hallucinating (hereditary mental illness from her mother, who died by suicide, is clumsily implied); if she has a sort of clairvoyant power that allows her to see the past in HD; or if these really are just night terrors in which one’s nostalgia for a time in which they didn’t live frighteningly turn on them when it’s most relied on. Whatever is happening, there’s no doubting it when things that once seemed confined to Eloise’s dreamworld begin creepily infiltrating her everyday life.
The best things about Last Night in Soho are unequivocally those early scenes set in 1965 Soho — eye-poppingly reimagined with swooning colors and palpable awe, with ingenious nods to Sandie and Eloise’s twinned identities via well-placed mirrors — and its soundtrack. Though the latter plays like a ‘60s Britpop compilation at the start, it increasingly has an intriguingly nightmarish charge the darker the movie becomes. But one wouldn’t expect to walk into a Wright movie expecting it not to be stylish, to not be infectiously soundtracked. His aesthetic confidence remains the most consistently strong facet of his body of work; they are, by now, fixed-in-place expectations.
That confidence does little to obscure that Last Night in Soho falters where it really counts. It’s too concerned with its central mystery to develop its characters in an approximately significant way; it’s too wrought up about its sense of style to build the kind of suspense that should be inescapable in what is an unmistakable foray into horror (a first for Wright). Eloise is drawn as so cartoonishly mousy that it fogs up who she is outside of nervous and naïve. Wright and co-screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns also barely interrogate the character’s ‘60s preoccupation or her lingering trauma over her mother’s death, which is only really invoked when she thinks she sees, sometimes, the woman standing in the reflections of mirrors, smiling warmly at her. There comes a point where our sympathy for Eloise droops into annoyance: she frustratingly takes for granted the arguably too-generous kindness of an unbelievably patient love interest (Michael Ajao) and the bar owner she works for when outbursts related to her escalating paranoia become more regular and dangerously unpredictable.
Although Sandie almost totally representing an appealing image is effective for her first few scenes — that’s all she is to Eloise at that point — her tragic arc, which comes to steep in harrowing sexual violence that is never fully grappled with, feels only half-written by Wright and Wilson-Cairns. (Sandie is ultimately betrayed in a final-hour plot twist that throws ice water on the sympathy the movie had for so long been heating up for her.) Last Night in Soho betrays both its lead actresses, too: these preternaturally gifted up-and-comers are unfairly tasked with sculpting roles too inherently formless to ever plausibly feel alive.
Wright cultivates no meaningful tension as Eloise’s reality starts to fracture. Obvious jump scares and cheap macabre imagery (namely badly CGI’d ghosts terrorizing her in daily life) are preferred to careful dread. We get none of what is basically the most purely nerve-wracking part of any descending-into-madness-style movie: that brief early period where a character thinks they’re seeing something, thinks they’re hearing something, but can’t be sure. Wright impatiently puts everything on the plate as soon as it’s logically acceptable to. Last Night in Soho avoids subtlety — a considerate build-up — at all costs. Wright doesn’t have any feeling for horror filmmaking. He just knows the kinds of horror movies he wants Last Night in Soho to superficially resemble. (His color palette and use of lighting will call to most peoples’ minds the crowning works of Dario Argento and Mario Bava; he’s nailed their look in a neutered sense, but little of their mood.)
The only truly frightening part of Last Night in Soho is actually accidental. Mid-movie, Eloise takes that earlier mentioned love interest, John, back home with her. Just as they’re about to have sex, she begins having visions of Sandie in a crisis. Eloise’s scared screams make her landlord think her tenant is being sexually assaulted; immediately, we’re fearful of what could happen to John, a Black man, if the police were to walk in on this misunderstanding between him and this saucer-eyed young white woman. Wright and Wilson-Cairns appear not to have thought at all about the ramifications of what was likely colorblind casting in this instance; we aren’t as much afraid looking through Eloise’s eyes because we’re more anxious for John, exceedingly aware of the racist history the scene immediately elicits. This moment summarizes John’s treatment in this movie overarchingly. We don’t know much about him except that he is always put into jeopardizing situations by Eloise while inexplicably continuing to return to her, despite there being no scenes that persuade us why he would have such affection for her. Eloise’s potentially imagined dangers are gracelessly translated as so much more important than the very real ones that could affect John that the film neglects to so much as passingly register the latter. (The most we get is John, early in the movie, noting that he feels like he and Eloise are spiritually similar because they both are familiar with feeling like they don’t belong.)
This lack of foresight isn’t limited to just this example: Last Night in Soho also offers nothing particularly perceptive to say about sex work, violence against women, childhood trauma, how the past informs the present, the perils of misplaced nostalgia. (That last idea has been more thoughtfully and intelligibly probed in almost every other movie Wright has made so far.) The film is a tangle of surface-level provocations glossified by Wright’s stylish touch; Last Night in Soho has the ungainly feeling of a movie you heard was ruthlessly cut in the editing room by the studio and subsequently lost the director’s vision, only there is no consolation of there existing somewhere in the ether a better film. Last Night in Soho warns of the dangers of sheltering yourself in what feels comfortable, of falling in love with imagined worlds built exclusively of cherished iconography. But ultimately the movie suggests that Wright, 20 years into his directing career, may not have the artistic dexterity required to step out of his comfort zone and make a movie that telegraphs thematic importance with the substance to match. It also suggests a filmmaker ironically too in love with previous cinematic references to make something coherent or unmistakably his own. Last Night in Soho’s inadequacy doesn’t negate Wright’s talents. Instead, it confirms their limitations.
FRANK HERBERT’S DUNE — the tentpole 1965 sci-fi novel accompanied by a quintet of sequels — has long been considered unadaptable, what with its rich and complicated worldbuilding and heady thematic ideas. The age-old, hard-to-definitively-answer question: how do you properly convey Dune’s physical and cerebral scale in the scope of a feature film or even a TV series? The former requires too much truncation; the latter typically doesn’t get enough budget to sufficiently channel Herbert’s grandeur.
Many have pursued adaptation anyway — a bold move that has historically rarely bode very well. Though visually stunning, David Lynch’s 1984 take misguidedly tried cramming the first book (itself a thick 412 pages) into one movie and wound up a critical and commercial flop much tampered with in the editing room by the studio. Lynch is uncomfortable to this day about even fleetingly acknowledging the movie; it’s generally considered the absolute nadir of his otherwise revered body of work. A couple of miniseries have been tried out, too; though better-received than Lynch’s attempt, neither has had a persisting impact.
Since Dune has seemed best left a literary triumph for several decades, it’s a little miraculous that the newest go at adaptation — this time it’s from French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (2016’s Arrival, 2017’s Blade Runner: 2049) — manages to not only avoid disastrousness but also be quite good. It’s transportive and thrillingly operatic; it finds an appropriate equilibrium between seriousness and understated goofiness. And the vast ensemble cast — helping spin a sometimes hard-to-follow story I’ll whittle down to being about a young royal (Timothée Chalamet) living thousands of years into the future in distant space learning he may be something of a “chosen one” — comprises actors who near-universally feel at home in these strange cosmos. (Special shoutout to Charlotte Rampling, Rebecca Ferguson, Jason Momoa, Stellan Skarsgård, and especially Stephen McKinley Henderson for their top-notch work.)
Villeneuve’s Dune, which adapts only the first half of the novel, can still falter remarkably. Some of that has to do with his approach; some comes from the very nature of the source material and the complexities it presents. The film’s emotional stakes never match how sensorially overwhelming everything else is; there are only a couple of scenes that stand individually somewhere close to great. (You’d think this would be more of a problem than it is as you’re watching.) And like the 1984 movie, there is a flattening of the Middle Eastern and North African influence Herbert had painstakingly imbued in his work in a way that teeters exoticized. (Though the movie’s large ensemble is diverse, there puzzlingly are no MENA actors cast in MENA roles; critic Roxana Hadidi recently wrote a great essay about this discordance for Vulture.) There isn’t enough distinguishable ambivalence, either, around the central placement of a white savior-like character in a story meant by Herbert to be in part obliquely anti-colonialist and challenging to messiah-centric storytelling.
Still, I couldn’t help but get swept up in Dune: this sweeping movie welcomely feels less of a piece with modern-day blockbusters than it does idiosyncratic science-fiction movies of yore with fortunately generous financial and creative licenses. I hope the sequel finds more time for emotional expansion (this first film is best at simply fertilizing dread); to render its indigenous characters more dimensional than they are here; and for those infamous colossus sandworms patrolling this universe’s deserts. Dune’s vague feelings of incompleteness — driven in at the end of the movie when a key character played by a blue-eyed Zendaya declares that “this is only the beginning” — will be cured soon enough. The sequel, hopefully to be called 2une, starts shooting next fall.
Peterson Reviews 