Edgar Wright and Wrong

I haven't seen much discourse around "Last Night in Soho" yet, which is surprising, because it's by pop-auteur Edgar Wright, and features some very controversial decisions. I guess "Eternals" is just eating up all the mindspace... which tells you all you need to know about discourse priorities.

Anyway, this review is going to compare LNiS and one of his first movies Hot Fuzz. This will be so spoilerific that I even blacked out what the movie of comparison is. Point is, only read beyond here if you have seen both movies and don't care about spoilers. (Also you should totally see Hot Fuzz, it's great. Also Last Night in Soho is totally a horror movie so don't see it if you dislike any aspect of scary movies.)

LNiS starts off very strong, using several standard cliches to tell us what moral universe we are in. Thomasin McKenzie plays a rural ingenue Eloise who is going to the city to study fashion, while we see her downplay the fact that she sees the ghost of her mother (which touches on both "generational trauma" and "hysterical women" genres.) The modern city she arrives to turns out to be... dingy and disillusioning. Her taxi driver makes "jokes" about stalking her, her dorm room is tiny and shared with a character we are supposed to see as "low class playing at elite," and all in all it's a shattering of the fantasy of the city Thomasin has from sixties culture of movies and dances and flowing dresses. So far, so good, the metaphorical stakes are set.

[The racial dynamics of the very English movie are... complicated. Eloise is lily white and a symbol of purity, and her first antagonists are women who all have much darker skin than her and were created in a lab to give off "cosmopolitan foreign vibes." But the filmmaker probably considers those cool girls largerly white, and the one person from the city who is uncomplicatedly nice to Eloise is very black. So you can read that as successful tokenism, or you can see the classism against the cool girls as shading into colorism if not specific racism. Anyway.]

In short order, Eloise moves into a flat in an old house and has a dream, where she is glamorous Anna Taylor-Joy in the height of sixties glamour. It's really a beautiful scene (I think it was single-shot, but not sure) and shows how what Eloise most wants is a high-class fantasy of the past. She has witty repartee and a fancy cocktail with Matt Smith who dances with her and then punches out a creepy guy who calls her a wh-re. (The movie makes frequent use of slurs against women to stab a scene with the threat of degradation. Eloise's greatest fear is to be the women these words describe, much like how the n-word was originally a word of *differentiation* between classes of freedmen, used only to describe the underclass that the middle-class African Americans feared becoming.)

But even in her dreams, the threat of class degradation follows Eloise, and her dream doppleganger Sandy. (Actually this is complicated: the dreams *start* with Eloise and Sandy performing the same actions and us seeing the other actress reflected in mirrors, which is really cool, but quickly Eloise moves to a third-person observer role and is often entirely separated from the actions Sandy takes.) She is tricked by Matt Smith (only known as "Jack") into being a sleazily dressed dancing girl to the hoots and jeers of ugly old men. We are then shown a horrific montage of her fellow dancing girls and how they fall into prostitution, which Sandy will as well. The movie leaves the sexual violence (mostly) as unseen dread, and emphasizes only how low-class the whole thing is.

Eloise spends a while losing her grip on reality as her dream world shifts into her waking life, and we are told this is just like what happened to her mother (and is a clear metaphor for the strain of moving to the city.) This climaxes in the film's tour-d-force where Eloise and her black boyfriend are hooking up in her bed and she suddenly starts seeing Jack murdering Sandy with a knife for disobeying him. Eloise starts screaming, the boy panics especially as she keeps screaming even after he has stepped away, and the landlord Ms. Collins bangs down the door. So in the same shot we have allusions to interracial sexual assault, black fear of being wrongly lynched, and a bloody sex trafficking murder that two of the five people in the scene can't see. It's intense. We see Sandy die of neck wounds.

Eloise spends the rest of this movie trying to solve the murder and find Jack (who she suspects to be a threatening creep at her bar, but isn't) and seeing her reality dissolve as spectres of all those ugly old male clients haunt her.

Here is where you have to trust I have told you everything relevant and am not skipping over minor details:

When Eloise tries to flee the city, Ms. Collins (for no particular reason) tells her that she is Sandy, and she actually took the knife and killed Jack, and then went hunting using the promise of her body, and killed dozens of her clients.

What.

Let's compare to one of Wright's first films "Hot Fuzz" which is about fascism (the word is used several times.) Simon Pegg plays a cop who strictly enforces the law to the letter and allows no flexibility. He is kicked out to small town with no crime and a police force that lets all scofflaws completely evade the justice system. He is incensed that this does not fit his conception of order, but the townspeople insist they are happy and he is too strict, which becomes absurd as we see a number of mysterious murders take place and the bucolic townspeople sweep them under the rug.

The twist halfway through is that the town elders are the real fascists, who summarily execute anyone who causes the slightest bit of trouble or ugliness to their town (including the kids who Pegg had brought in for underage drinking.) The theme of the entire movie so far had been "the pursuit of law can go too far", the flip is only that it's not Pegg's character who was going too far. And the conflict of "adherence to the law" vs "local judgment" shows that the latter can be just as cruel and destructive as the former.

It's a really fun movie that pays off paying attention to detail and caring about themes. Heck they spend like five minutes of screentime flashing back to every minor clue that set this up, clues as frequent and small as a typo of the protagonist's name in the local paper.

The point is that LNiS does *none of this*. All we've seen of Sandy is a horrifying trap of sex-trafficking, and not like, a cruel streak of someone who likes to take visceral vengeance. Her first killing is an entirely justified self-defense... and then the narration just tells us she also committed uncountable serial killings after that. (There's a similarity to I Am Legend when we learn these ghosts of ugly men haunting Eloise were trying to seek justice, but again lacking I Am Legend's buildup. In the Will Smith movie, we can see all of the zombies' actions were about freeing their damsel in distress, whereas these ghosts "help" Eloise get their justice by... holding her down and trapping her.)

I am sympathetic to "in pursuit of justice we can go too far and become the real villain", but you have to build that shit up. You can't just show an extremely sympathetic victim and then say "once they got any agency they killed a dozen people off screen how about that?"

[Also this Sandy is now definitely the villain, and the action of the climax is her trying to kill Eloise and her boyfriend and then burning to death in her house.]

And it's really sad because the first nine/tenths of the movie is so good artistically. The set design is excellent at details for both showing a high-glamour and a gritty and dingey world. The blocking choreography for Sandy and Eloise are amazing (and what many in the audience probably came for.) Everyone involved obviously loves fashion and treated this movie as an excuse to dive into the closest of half a century ago. So much about this movie is good, and I am sure Wright wanted to inject moral nuance into a typical damsel-in-distress narrative. But "what if everything you knew was actually the other way around" just doesn't do it.

To play contrarian, you could make an *existentialist* argument that the film is precisely about our lack of knowledge. That just because you dreamed of yourself as the ghost of a person and identified with them *does not mean you actually know them.* The being you identified with may end up being very much not you, the victim you pitied may be the real monster, and the world of the past you longed for you never understood. But again, it's better when that is supported by the text in some way and not just a rug ripped out from under you in the last moment.