I’ll start by saying I’m a HUGE fan of Edgar Wright. I was a fan before I even paid attention to writers and directors. He has such a way with music (if you haven’t watched Baby Driver, go watch it). Though I’d watched Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, it was really Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World that solidified my love for his work. That film was so inspiring to me as a writer.
Anyway, I say all that to say, Last Night in Soho was a leap of faith for me. If I love his other work, I’ll love this one, right? Now, I don’t want this post or any of my posts to bash a film. I never want to say a film is a bad film, not that I think this is a bad film, I just think it isn’t a film for me.
To sum up the film briefly, a young woman named Eloise, who goes by Ellie, goes to London to study fashion design. She seems to be able to communicate with the dead and when she rents a room for an elderly lady, those abilities kick into overdrive. She starts “reliving” a woman’s life from the 60s, a woman called Sandie, had big dreams of being a star. She trusted the wrong man and becomes a prostitute to support herself.
Before watching the film, I read the script, and it didn’t pull me in like others have. It felt like a chore to read, so I worried I’d feel the same about the film itself. The visuals and music did a lot more for me than the script alone, which didn’t come as a surprise to me… Nonetheless, I didn’t connect to the film.
I’ll put it bluntly (and I think it’s fair for me to say because someone can easily say the same about a script I wrote… if anyone were to read it.) The whole time I watched the film, I couldn’t help but think I was watching a lesser version of Black Swan. Or a version of Black Swan that I didn’t connect with as I connected with Black Swan.
When I watch a film and don’t fall in love with it, I like to go online and read reviews and watch video analysis, because I want to make sure I didn’t miss something. When I first watched Midsommar, I wasn’t a fan, but after research and a few analysis videos, I liked it. This wasn’t the case.
It all starts with Eloise. I don’t like her. I don’t connect with her and I never understand why she is doing the things she’s doing. I also wish there had been a bit more exploration of her powers. How they work and what not. It was confusing because I felt I didn’t know the rules to them. Eloise reminds me of Nina from Black Swan. Both start the film very meek, and change throughout the film. Where I could understand Nina’s change, and her descent into madness, Eloise’s was confusing for me. It was also unclear to me why she bonded so closely to Sandie. I understood they were both went to London to make their dreams come true, but that seemed to be where the parallels ended for them.
Maybe it was an issue of the story I thought was interesting wasn’t told. I would have loved for Eloise to see her mother’s journey. It would have been more of an emotional connection for the two characters.
It also felt like the film took a while to get going. There was a lot of time spent with her schoolmates, and they didn’t really end up being important to the plot. Then the twist at the end… If you haven’t watched the film, you shouldn’t be reading this… but nonetheless, we’re going into spoilers.
Ellie sometimes is living as Sandie as she dreams, but as the film goes on, she sees things when she is awake (again, how her powers worked weren’t clear.) She sees Sandie being murdered, and now wants to avenge Sandie’s murder… However, she learns the elderly lady she is renting a room from is Sandie… Even though she saw Sandie get murdered, it was actually Sandie murdering Jack, her pimp… Which begs the question, if that vision can be incorrect, how does Ellie now that any of it is what actually happened. Sandie started murdering her johns and now decides to murder Ellie, and the guy she likes, who just so happens to be named John. There were also these ghost men chasing Ellie around… and even though she never they were hallucinations, she still would run from them and/or try to attack them… almost stabbing a schoolmate in the face.
The beginning of the film eludes to Ellie suffering from hallucinations in the past due to her powers… So, a big thing for me was, why didn’t she call her grandmother and/or leave London? I get it, you have a story to tell, but for someone so meek, it didn’t make sense that as soon as things got out of hand, she didn’t contact her grandmother.
Anyway, Sandie is going to kill her, and goes into the room where she killed Jack, and all the other men, and she sees the ghosts.. and then decides not to kill Ellie and to just let herself die. I don’t know. The whole time, I just felt like there was something I missed that made everything click together.
It wasn’t a bad film. It looked great. It sounded great. I thought everyone did a great job, acting wise… I just couldn’t connect to the story, and Ellie’s motivation and behavior didn’t make sense to me. If someone reading this loved the film and wants to tell me how they interpreted it, I would love to have a conversation. Maybe my love of Black Swan is what kept me from enjoying it fully?
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