Killing Two Birds with One Stone
or
Who Are you Wearing?
Edgar Wright's new film, Last Night in Soho, is his first horror/thriller film where the purpose isn't to make fun of them, where the emphasis is on the disorientation and not the whimsy (but don't worry, there are a lot of cheeky touches to it).
In it, a mousy fashion-design student, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie—from Jojo Rabbit) moves to the big city of London to attend classes and achieve her goals of becoming au courant. But, as her grandmother (Rita Tushingham !!) warns her "London can be a lot."
That it can be. Even in one time-line. Eloise has a rough first day, what with meeting her room-mate and a coven of snarky "mean girls" who occupy her dorm. It's tough on Eloise, who misses her Mum (she'd committed suicide when Eloise was a girl, but kept seeing images of her in the mirror back home). Finally, she decides to rent a room in Soho from Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg !!) who's been there forever and wouldn't think of selling the place—"Too many memories". That should have been put in the advert.
Eloise loves the place, seeing as she's obsessed with the 1960's. She's constantly spinning the old EP's—traveling, she takes an over-loaded suitcase and a record-player—and her fashion-sense runs to the eye-popping 60's. It's the place she'd most like to go-go. But be careful what you're wishin' and hopin' for. She goes to sleep with the neon buzz of the "Soho" sign right outside her window, and with the R.E.M blink of an eye, she finds herself back there, to find a world still fruging and twisting and swinging.
There's one little hitch, though. When she looks in the mirror—or any reflective surface—she sees somebody else's reflection, a woman who turns out to be named Alexandra (Anya Taylor-Joy)—"Call me Sandy"—an aspiring singer-dancer who wants to be the "next Cilla Black." Eloise and Sandy are tied to each other as they roam around the "Cafe de Paris" separated only by a silvered plate of glass, as Eloise watches her make her way through the club, fending off would-be suitors until finally latching on to Jack (Matt Smith), the loungiest of lounge-lizards, who promises to get her into "the business."
But, as Eloise witnesses whenever she goes to sleep, the path of success is littered with slimy, handsy men making promises and repeated pick-up lines that end up in disappointment and being used. As the old saying goes "nostalgia isn't what it used to be" and Eloise finds these visions only adding to her "outsider" stress and fears about life in the big city. Could Alexandra's cautionary tale be something that Eloise is inextricably tied to? And when that tale leads to murder is there anything she can do from being drawn into that fate?
