Sensationalist dialogue examples:
“This is London. Someone has died in every room and every building and on every street corner in the city.”
“London can be a lot.”
RACE IN LAST NIGHT IN SOHO
Daniels, Robert. “Last Night in Soho”, Roger Ebert, 2021, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/last-night-in-soho-movie-review-2021.
“Last Night in Soho” also suffers from a common mistake that arises from colorblind casting. To elicit a scare in one scene, unintentionally the scariest in the film, the film’s lone Black character (Michael Ajao) is dressed for Halloween only to have his night end in a near-rape accusation by a white woman. It’s difficult to further discuss the scene without major spoilers, but filmmakers need to understand that merely casting a Black actor isn’t enough, especially with the racial history of a scene like this one. Afterwards, that Black character still tries to help the white person who nearly got him killed, a decision that’s more far-fetched than any ghoul.
Slater, Alexander. “Sixties sexploitation swings back in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho.” Little White Lies, 2021, https://lwlies.com/articles/last-night-in-soho-edgar-wright-sexual-exploitation/.
Another scene seemingly unaware of its implications concerns Eloise’s love interest, John (Michael Ajao). When the couple climb into bed together for the first time, Eloise hallucinates that Jack is attacking Sandy. Her confusion translates into harrowing screams and pleas for John to stop. On the one hand this scene, which boils down to a white woman crying wolf against an innocent Black man, broaches the complex power dynamic between women and men in both the past and present. On the other it is a validation of the ‘what if she’s lying’ sexual abuse defence that is counterproductive to the feminist narrative the film is apparently striving for.
DEPICTION OF SEX WORK
Slater, Alexander. “Sixties sexploitation swings back in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho.” Little White Lies, 2021, https://lwlies.com/articles/last-night-in-soho-edgar-wright-sexual-exploitation/.
Wright crafts an ambitious story with psychedelic visuals and razor-sharp editing. His film is a hypnotic painting of the past packaged as a neo-giallo. Unfortunately, Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ attempt at a post-#MeToo cautionary tale is ill-judged for the decision to use sex work as an allegory. The film’s treatment of historical sexual abuse, and the implication that women like Sandy are damaged and therefore doomed to a life of crime and misery, demonises sex work and perpetuates the dangerous stigma against sex workers. [...] To give Wright the benefit of the doubt, the ‘Puppet on a String’ scene could be justified as a means of visually portraying men’s misogynistic attitudes toward women during the ’60s – yet the very next scene, in which Eloise explores the backstage of the club, demerits any credible argument. Behind every door is a different woman in a submissive position, engaging in fellatio. Throughout Last Night in Soho, the audience is bombarded with superfluous sexual imagery at the expense of its female characters. There is something hypocritical about critiquing the past’s objectification of women while simultaneously paralleling it. Beyond the imagery, the tragic arc of Taylor-Joy’s character is underpinned by an outdated sex work narrative. Stripped of any agency, Sandy embodies a biased and harmful sex worker stereotype. She is presented as a meek victim who needs saving by Eloise, a modern-day young woman. Whatever Wright’s intentions, it’s disappointing to see the film hurtle towards an old-fashioned horror trope where the fate of a female character is tied to her sexuality. The film does attempt to redeem Sandy in its final act, but this only leads it into the even murkier territory of false victimisation.
Newland, Christina. “Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho gets everything about feminism – and race – wrong.” iNews, 2021, https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/edgar-wright-film-last-night-in-soho-anya-taylor-joy-uk-release-cinemas-1261726.
Initially, Wright’s film has its pleasures – mostly in the aesthetic of its dreamworld, with its baby-doll minidresses and chrome-spoke wheel cars. It seems to be setting up a “be careful what you wish for” admonition to those who yearn to live in the past regardless of its pitfalls – not least sexism, particularly in the case of Sandie, who is dragged into the undertow of Soho’s sex industry. And this is where those chrome-spoke wheels begin to fall off. Sandie is forced against her will into sex work, violently bullied by shouty Cockney men who tell her that her dreams of being a singer can be reached only through these means. It is a blunt-edged portrayal of sex work, taking away any sense of agency from Taylor-Joy’s character and turning her into a doe-eyed victim that Eloise, a young modern girl, knows she must “save”. Demonising sex work as a trade which only ever can lead to misery and death is already pretty basic if you want to offer a rebuke to the patriarchy in your movie. But then the final big twist of Last Night in Soho arrives. Sandie’s suspected demise is turned upside-down, flipping the switch on the expected narrative of her victimhood, but doing so in a manner that has zero sense of empowerment or forethought.
DEPICTION OF FEMALE CHARACTERS:
Lodge, Guy. “‘Last Night in Soho’ Review: Edgar Wright’s Retro Horror Has Its Heart in the Sixties and Its Head All Over the Place”, Variety, 2021, https://variety.com/2021/film/reviews/last-night-in-soho-review-1235056373/.
You could counter that many of the Hammer Horror and giallo films woven into “Last Night in Soho’s” vintage fabric (the 1972 Hammer effort “Straight on Till Morning,” also starring Tushingham, seems one of several specific reference points) didn’t treat their female characters all that differently, though Wright’s film also strives for a postmodern, politically updated perspective that it only intermittently hits.
DEPICTION OF MENTAL ILLNESS / HYSTERIA
DOUBLING // THE UNCANNY // POSSESSION
DREAMS AND TIME TRAVEL
SPECTATORSHIP // DREAMING // BEARING WITNESS // VICTIMHOOD
VICTIM OR KILLER? SANDIE AS A FEMME CASTRATRICE:
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. Routledge, 1993.
In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualized only as victim. [...] The main reason for this is that most writers adopt Freud’s argument that woman terrifies because she is castrated, that is, already constituted as victim. Such a position only serves to reinforce patriarchal definitions of woman which represent and reinforce the essentialist view that woman, by nature, is a victim. My intention is to explore the representation of woman in the horror film and to argue that woman is represented as monstrous in a significant number of horror films. However, I am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is ‘feminist’ or ‘liberated’. The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity. However, this presence does challenge the view that the male spectator is almost always situated in an active, sadistic position and the female spectator in a passive, masochistic one.
EDGAR WRIGHT ON NOSTALGIA:
Olsen, Mark. “How Edgar Wright set out to challenge himself, and the past, with ‘Last Night in Soho.’” LA Times, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-11-03/last-night-in-soho-explained-edgar-wright.
“Something that I find truly nightmarish — and I guess there’s an element where I’m sort of giving a sharp rebuke to myself — is the danger of being overly nostalgic about previous decades,” said Wright. “In a way, the film is about romanticizing the past and why it’s ... wrong to do that. When people use the phrase ‘the good old days,’ it’s to suggest that there was a decade where everything was perfect and nothing was bad. And of course that’s not true. Everything that’s bad now, it’s just as bad then if not worse. And it would be wrong to look back with rose-tinted spectacles.”
EDGAR WRIGHT ON THE LONDON SETTING:
Olsen, Mark. “How Edgar Wright set out to challenge himself, and the past, with ‘Last Night in Soho.’” LA Times, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-11-03/last-night-in-soho-explained-edgar-wright.
“A lot of films of that period are about the darker side of Soho or of show business,” said Wright of the sub-strain of ’60s films that served as a core inspiration. “You still have to question where they’re coming from, because there’s a lot of them, which are more the sensationalistic ones, that take this kind of punitive approach to the female characters. There’s a lot of movies where it seems that the genre is ’Girl comes to London to make it big and is roundly punished for her efforts.’ “And they’re all written by men and directed by men. And it seems like the old guard slapping down the liberated generation,” Wright said. “That was one of the many kernels of the idea that I thought, ‘This is an interesting genre.’ And what if you did a movie where you kind of subverted it to a modern perspective through a twin narrative of a contemporary girl coming to the big city too?”
REVIEW: THE TELEGRAPH
Collin, Robbie. “Last Night in Soho, review: a chilling dance through Swinging London – under Diana Rigg’s eyes.” The Telegraph, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210908134813/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/last-night-soho-review-chilling-dance-swinging-london-diana/.
For a sense of its tone, imagine one of those playful-yet-cautionary postwar British dramas about innocent young women making their way in the big city – most of them seemed to star Rita Tushingham, who has a talismanic supporting role here as Eloise’s grandmother – then refract it through the lurid crack-up horror lens of Suspiria or Repulsion.