I always assumed my death – or at the very least the deaths of my enemies, who are vile, and cunning – would occur before Edgar Wright made a bad movie, but here we are.

Last Night in Soho Review

Edgar Wright perfected making an Edgar Wright movie many years ago, which makes sense because he’s Edgar Wright. The beats and gestures of his films nearly constitute their own pocket dictionary at this point, or at the very least the map of an alternate reality where giddy genre thrills, buckets of gore, Looney Tunes logic, and boyhood fantasies chased with pathos all interact uncannily but right, like particles in the weirder regions of the standard model. Really, I can’t think of anyone else I’d want to make an Edgar Wright movie. And I’m not being cute! Being the best at making your own type of movie does not go without saying. Plenty of people could make, say, a Ron Howard movie, because Ron Howard is a computer algorithm trained on a constant loop of mid-tier Spielberg movies. But if you want an Edgar Wright movie made as Edgar Wright-ingly as possible, you call in the dork himself.

But the thing about having such a honed and aggressively, almost uncompromisingly distinct cinematic voice is that you are essentially locked into telling whatever narrow kind of story that voice specializes in. You don’t let Lina Wertmüller direct an episode of Sesame Street, for instance, and you don’t call in Alejandro Jodorowsky to be your wedding videographer. Peg, hole, etc. So when Edgar Wright turned his attention – and his filmmaking preoccupations, joys, blind spots, biases, and prerogatives – towards the inclusion of wokeness in his oeuvre the appropriate response wasn’t a slow clap so much as the Homer Simpson Walking Backwards Into a Hedge meme. This isn’t any kind of commentary on Wright as a person – for all I know he’s so attuned to social issues he makes the Women’s March look like a Fox News company cookout. But a style of filmmaking that prioritizes genre thrills above all else is always going to be an awkward bedfellow with topics as raw and personal and real as sexual assault, or the extent to which the laws of an oppressive society should apply to the very people being oppressed by that society. One requires a somber reassessment of nearly all of one’s assumptions about not just public life but the very criteria by which we determine right from wrong, in addition to the ability to place yourself into situations as chillingly far from your normative experiences as might be psychologically possible; the other usual features Simon Pegg dance-fighting to a Queen song.

Unfortunately, the product on the screen confirms these fears, as Wright’s ham-fisted attempts to prove his woke bonafides meshes so awkwardly with his desire to make a classic Edgar Wright movie that the two competing impulses pull each other down into a kind of storytelling suicide pact. The social commentary is almost offensively shuttered and self-satisfied – when it’s not straight-up incoherent – and the genre trappings and Wright-ian beats feel bizarre and obnoxious because they’re constantly intruding on the seriousness and severity of the topics at hand. By the time the credits roll on this one you’re left not nodding your head in agreement with Wright’s take on society so much as feeling every molecule in your body letting out a simultaneous “what the fuck?”, a response whose singular and collective loudness constitutes a more cohesive gesture than anything in the film.

Let’s Start at the Goddamned Beginning

But for a few glorious minutes, it works. The opening to Soho is a hypnotizing synthesis of Wright’s classic style and fresh prerogatives, and it gives hope that he might actually pull this motherfucker off. The very first image we’re given, of a blindingly-lit and distant door opening against otherwise pure blackness, with our protagonist Ellie framed inside of it and blown to shadow against its mysterious depths, all before she starts to dance with unnerving marionette movements is, if you’ll allow me to drop my literary voice for a moment, creepy as fuck. And it’s perfect. There’s an innocence going on – Ellie is having a blast acting our her favorite fantasy, being carefree in Swingin’ 1960’s London – that is so innocent it fails to see its own darker undercurrents (Ellie being faceless; being a marionette; being literally draped in the culture of the time, as indicated by the custom-made newspaper dress she’s wearing; the door of golden light actually being a portal to a world of darkness) pervading her game. It reminded me of a child pretending to smoke a crayon because they saw an adult smoking a cigarette – the kid doesn’t mean anything by it, but in their endearing innocence they are propagating a life-threatening behavior. Really, as long as this glorious visual style maintains, and as long as such startling naïveté is only being introduced as Ellie’s dominant characteristic so that the events of the film may harden it out of her, then I’ll be sound as a pound, Ed.

Unfortunately, the movie makes the terrible mistake of continuing to exist beyond its darkly-fascinating opening dance number, and whatever alchemy Wright managed to whip up for that breathtaking synthesis of style and thought almost immediately denatures back into cold solution, with the scene’s two chief ingredients – the twin goals of Making an Edgar Wright Movie and Being An Ally –  never again working in concert but instead tripping over each other’s feet like a Laurel and Hardy bit, except stupider, and also everyone is a rapist. Shortly after the opener Ellie is accepted into art school and takes a cab into London to start the semester, wherein we get a taste of what will be the actual body of the film: blunt, bizarre, and pandering commentary. Her driver on the way into town obsessively talks about her legs and how badly he wants to stalk her, all before reassuring her – in a moment of completely improbable self-awareness from someone portrayed as little more than breathing libido – that she shouldn’t take any solace in escaping from him because every man she’s going to encounter in the city is also a dangerous pervert. The intention of this scene is obvious, and could work: we’re being introduced to the monstrous potentials dormant – or not-so-dormant – in all men, anywhere, regardless of how innocent they seem at first, and how they pay no price for their gleeful cruelties. But it’s all rendered so blunt and awkward – the dude pretty much announces everything I just said, like he got a look at the director’s notes, or something – that you want to roll your eyes more than fear for Ellie’s safety. It’s commentary from a director who presumably has never experienced unwanted sexual advances before, so in lieu of making an exchange between his characters more believable he makes it more cinematic, cranking up the color contrast and speeding everything up so that he might find comfort in his own storytelling milieu. It’s almost a dismissal of the very real feelings that Ellie must be feeling by a director less concerned with understanding his protagonist’s plight than he is proving that he can work said plight into the structure of one of his movies.

And Wright’s inarticulacies undercut in the opposite direction, too, with his thematic aspirations kneecapping basic storytelling structure and character agency. We don’t even need to jump to another sequence to see this. Ellie’s entire response to the cab driver’s advances is to hop out of his car and hide in a convenience store and wait for him to go away, in a moment that becomes inadvertently funny, as the camera hard cuts to nighttime, implying that she has been pretending to decide which soda to buy for, like, ten hours. This simply doesn’t work as a demonstration of her naïveté in the same way that the opening dance number does. In the opening scene Ellie has agency, and power, she’s just wielding it in the service of a conception of reality that is too shuttered for its own good. In the convenience store scene, conversely, she just kind of stares blankly for a long-ass time, like she’s waiting for the camera to cut to something else. Forget about themes and undercurrents and heady topics for a moment – it’s simply boring storytelling for our protagonist to be an empty cypher, whatever internal life she may have apparently placed on the backburner in service of a director stepping forward and pointing at something in the background and calling out to the audience, “look! I’ve made a commentary!”. And this deeply disturbing concept, of Wright essentially pushing his female protagonist out of the way, denying her any type of behavior other than pure helplessness so that he might stress the social sensitivity of his filmmaking, comes back again and again. It’s awful patriarchal for a film about the shittiness of the patriarchy, which I’m pretty sure is an irony!

But Now We Will Talk About Details

But I’ll bitch about loftier concepts later. Right now I want to bitch about petty details some more, because it’s important to stress how the movie fails as a movie just as much as it fails as a commentary, but also because you can only write “the patriarchy” a maximum of four times in any article before a weird neckbearded twenty-something riding a bomb labelled “NOT ALL MEN” lands on the roof of your house, killing you and all of your neighbors instantly. And I don’t want that. My neighbors are nice. Anywhere, here we go:

There’s a library scene in this movie! What in the fucking shit! That’s terrible, incredibly not-good, and I repudiate the notion on the strongest possible terms! I honestly never thought I’d see the day where Edgar Wright wasn’t sure where to go next with the plot of his movie so he turned to a fucking library scene to goose the juice and carry us to the finish line! But no, like a dark moon hanging over your goddamned horoscope this movie actually features the harrowing reality of our protagonist going to the library to research all of the spooky things happening to her, presumably in the Spooky Things section, which must only exist in movies because I’ve never seen one in a real library before (Nicholas Sparks books don’t count). For those of you lucky enough to have no idea what I’m talking about, a) congratulations, you’ve never seen a Blumhouse movie before, and b) I am ranting about this seemingly innocuously detail because you never put a library/research scene in your horror movie! It’s a bad thing! It’s filler! It’s visually and dramatically inert! It’s pure, clunky, uninspired exposition! It slows the pacing to a crawl! And I like libraries! Like ‘em so much that I don’t want them getting all gunked up inside the machinery of a horror movie! You put a library scene in Spotlight, not Last Night in Soho (the library scene in Spotlight is masterful, by the way, and that film as a whole is probably a more effective horror movie than Soho. Fucking Catholics, man.). So unless you happen to have a thing for steamy and salacious scenes of Person Looking at Computer Screen, Occasionally Clicking to Look at More Slides, then you will most likely be bored during this scene! Bad form, Edgar! Bad form!

It’s like so much effort was put into the (weird, ineffective) social commentary that Wright forgot to keep a steadying hand on the parts of filmmaking that he’s an all-time great at. The library sequence was an absolute clunker, sure, but the startlingly-bad structural details aren’t just limited to the plot.

This is the part where we talk about John.

What the Fuck.

I know that a lot of the failures in this movie result from Edgar Wright’s well-intentioned-but-tone-deaf feminist commentary but for the fucking life of me I can’t figure out what smiling misfire resulted in John. He is either the dumbest man alive or gripped by a thirstiness so Biblical in its scope that he could singlehandedly reseed the planet with life after an extermination-level event, assuming of course the remaining females with which he had to work were of his apparently preferred type, lunatics. From the moment he meets Ellie he is not just smitten with her he is obsequious, doing everything short of dropping to his knees in front of her, kissing her feet, and whispering, “punish me, mother, punish me for being the dumb boy that I am, so imperfect in your immaculate presence.” Like so many aspects of this film John’s weird acceptance of all things Ellie starts off innocent enough but quickly balloons to cartoonish, seemingly satirical extremes. Almost all of their encounters culminate in her freaking out and running away because of some ghost/vision/whatever that only she can see, and in every scene after one of these psychedelic freak-outs John either doesn’t acknowledge that anything strange happened or for some reason apologizes to her, as if the entire thing was his fault. This isn’t the endearingly-shuttered vision of a smitten young man; it’s like he’s on the spectrum or something, or his blindness to the incredibly obvious is supposed to be a running joke (it is a joke, just not a deliberate one).

I mean, during the library research scene (ranted about to great completion above, if you happen to be skimming!) John appears (because of course he fucking does) and basically says to Ellie, “I know that you went insane again last night for the thirtieth time in the thirty meetings we’ve had and this one ended in you accusing me of rape but I’m still willing to fail my final exams to help you research a topic that you still refuse to explain to me fully – oh, look, you’re running away again, screaming about something that only you can see. Well, I’ll just pick up your handbag for you and drive down every street in London so that I might bump into you again and return it to you, you whose happiness is my exclusive concern, even to exclusion of my own well-being.” He even gets fucking stabbed because of her incompetence (and because she is, once again, selfishly using him for her own protection) and I swear to God as he fell to the ground with what might have been a mortal wound I honestly thought he was going to reach out a bloodied hand and say, “but, Ellie, how are you doing? I’m sorry I got stabbed because you’re an idiot, Ellie – that was very rude of me. Your hair looks wonderful today. You are perfect, and I am scum.” This is the part where I’m supposed to tie this behavior, this pristine-to-the-point-of-satire behavior, into the ineffective social commentary, but I honestly have no idea what to make of it. Maybe it was Wright losing track of the character because he was too busy with The Commentary, or maybe I’m dumb and missing something, but it’s fucking weird, man.

And so many other details in Soho that are just strange, and feel like the kinds of beats that Wright should be crushing in his sleep, but for some reason just can’t integrate properly. Terrence Stamp getting run over (a bizarre attempt at concluding a red herring, because we’ve seen Ellie almost get run over multiple times, and are presumably expecting it to happen to her) the red emergency phone (another bizarre attempt at both foreshadowing and a red herring), having the entirely superfluous mean girls at school (something about women being each other’s worst enemies, sometimes? but they don’t even factor into the plot!), and so many more moments just feel off, like someone trying to make a knockoff of an Edgar Wright movie. The tightness that usually characterizes the director’s work is blown all askew by his efforts to include commentary in nearly every scene, so that nothing gels.

But probably the weirdest and worst of all of these failures is something I wrote about earlier, and will now turn my interminable complaining back upon: Ellie’s complete lack of agency. While the other mistakes in the movie are various degrees of obnoxious – that library scene, man –Ellie’s role as a cypher for Wright to maneuver as he sees fit is borderline offensive. Our protagonist is portrayed not as a neophyte setting out for the beginning of a hard-but-necessary character arc so much as a total moron, useless to such a degree that it almost feels like Wright actively dislikes her. She responds to almost every conflict by running away, usually while crying. I kept expecting this to culminate in a moment where she refuses to run away (almost like a character arc of some kind), but, uh, nope. Our hero flees tearfully from: the cab driver at the beginning of the movie (it was her first encounter with the city and the city’s monstrous inhabitants, we need to see her fail before she succeeds – I’ll allow it, previous comments notwithstanding) from the dorm because everybody is too loud (I can relate, and we’re still early on, so we can accept that running away is still her default response to conflict) and from the reality of her visions (getting a little…redundant, now), and then from basic social responsibility (seriously, she treats John like shit) and then from the haunted bedroom itself (you’d think this would be the resolution of the “run from the dorm” moment earlier in the movie, because now Ellie has the resolve to confront a, uh, bad sleeping situation, but you’d be wrong). I mean, the final confrontation in this movie happens by accident because Ellie picks totally the wrong time to try and get her deposit back. This is all evidence of poor storytelling, but also something darker: Wright is rendering his female protagonist into a non-character so that he may move her from Moment of Woke Commentary to Moment of Woke Commentary, with near contempt for the notion that she could resolve a conflict by herself. He’s making himself center-stage in a movie about how men are awful and always trying to take center stage!

This all culminates in a plot twist and a climax so calamitously strange that it’s like we’re instead being treated to less a culmination of story than all the movie’s failures. The “gotcha!” twist is borderline offensive from the standpoint of the thematic undercurrents of the movie, butt-dumb stupid with respect to what remains of the plot, and the best possible example of Wright’s filmmaking style simply not being well-fitted to a topic a delicate and horrifying as sexual violence in the context of the patriarchy (I think I’ve got one more left, but I lost count. Whatever; I’m ready to die). See, respecting the thematic concerns of this movie would require a somber reflection on the road that Sandy went down after being violated by the culture and responding by hardening herself against all the people who enabled that culture. You could even make a strong argument that she was justified in her actions, and with superior filmmaking really let that challenging argument settle, possible uncomfortably, in the audience’s mind! But the obligations of genre – thrill the audience, hit them with the unexpected! – requires a (it helps if you sing this next part, to really drive home the sarcasm) ploooooot twiiiiist. Wright tries to pull off both of these at the same time, a là the dancing sequence with which we started the movie, but it does not work at all.

(spoilers, spoilers, boo-hoo, oh no the mean man is going to tell me how the ghost movie ends, oh tragedy of tragedies)

The plot twist that the ghoulish ghost-men haunting Ellie throughout the movie were actually victims, and that Sandy is an unhinged serial killer is borderline fucking offensive. It’s like Wright knew the audience was expecting a twist – it’s a horror movie after all, a genre characterized by third-act twists – so he decided to make the film’s blunt commentary itself the twist, with the woman we’ve been nearly screamed at to have undying sympathy for (which she deserves, those men were monsters!) being revealed to be a crazed killer. Let’s be super clear: you, uh, don’t make your obsessively and panderingly-included feminist commentary the twist to your film unless you’re making an anti-feminist movie. In fact, this idea – that Sandy is the real monster – is so dumb and awful in its inclusion that the movie itself seems to know this and immediately tries to hedge. Ellie, after realizing that Sandy butchered like, a billion people, and hearing her reasoning (“they deserved it”) quickly agrees with her. This is a sudden and clunky veering away from the previous ten minutes of movie, in which Sandy is described as fucking nuts; it’s like Wright realized that maybe making the rape victim the real monster might not be the best possible idea so he backtracks almost immediately after introducing the argument and satisfying his desire for a juicy (once more, really belt it out) ploooot twiiiiist. Nothing says this is something I believe in fervently quite like immediately taking a statement back after you say it, and the double-take shows that Wright doesn’t know what he wants to say, and is compensating by just saying a lot of things, constantly. If you look closely during this scene you can actually see Wright awkwardly trying to juggle two huge objects labelled FEMINIST COMMENTARY and GENRE THRILLS and somehow managing to drop both on his own dick simultaneously.

And the attempt to play both sides, while also mixing genre thrills and weird social commentary happens again. In the final moments of the film we see Ellie sharing a smile with a young Sandy right before we cut to black. There are a few possible implications here: that Ellie and Sandy have an understanding and some closure over the road the latter went down (which, if they came to one during the film’s climax must’ve happened when I blinked, because they pretty much just ran around screaming at each other, with no real greater understanding arising from the effort), or that Ellie has adopted Sandy’s approach to combatting the patriarchy and is eager to become a serial killer herself (which would be pretty nuts and offensive and imply that any woman who wants to defend herself invariably becomes a lunatic murderer). These are both very strange possibilities! Just like the weird-ass conversation they have in the burning bedroom (Ellie supports Sandy, but actually doesn’t, but thinks the rapists needed some form of comeuppance, just not murder; actually, no, murder is fine) this is another terrible attempt to synthesize feminist commentary and a plot twist. Maybe if Ellie found out the truth about Sandy earlier in the film, and between the revelation and their shared smile in the mirror uncovered the fact that in killing those men Sandy saved several young women from grisly fates, but at the cost of her own soul, then the understanding smiles would be more coherent. But as it stands the final image of the film just doesn’t make any fucking sense. But you’re supposed to end your horror movie with that final twist before the credits roll and this is that, reproduced in all its idiotic and nearly offensive glory.

I’m Not Reading This Review in Its Entirety Because I Never Read Any of These Reviews in Their Entirety Because I’m Going to Die One Day and Want to Feel the Warmth of the Outside World on my Face Before Charon Takes Me Across the River Styx and I Cannot Do This if I Am Forced to Google Whatever the Fuck the Standard Model Is, So Just Give Me the Upshot You Indulgent and Meandering Old Bastard

This original sin in this movie is that Wright decided to point out biases in society without bothering to check his own first. He takes for granted that Ellie wants to be a fashion designer, that her greatest aspiration in life is to live the beautiful life in 60’s London and then tells her – and the audience – that, “no, ladies, there’s more to life than dying your hair to resemble your favorite actress!” I’m pretty sure they know that! If you have to reduce your characters to caricatures so that you may instruct them in the ways of Better Living – or as it’s also known, making a South Park episode – then all you’ve really done is betray your own incuriousness and condescension, your undying belief that everybody is stupid except for you. It’s a form of paternalism in a movie about paternalism, and from this blind spot in the director’s eye we get so many of the movie’s weirdest elements: Ellie’s investigation into Sandy’s apparent murder being so incompetent that she gets an innocent man run over by a car, the fact that she fails to realize that her own landlady is the killer, the bizarre and incoherent conclusion in which Sandy’s descent into murder is implied to be both commendable and inexcusable. Really, his protagonist and her frenemy are portrayed as cosmically stupid, because Wright apparently can’t conceive of them as being any way else, so when we get to our final (and extremely discombobulated) conversation in the burning bedroom we aren’t witness to a heartbreaking scene of two women commiserating across time about their shared loss of innocence against a monster – the real monster of the movie – that exists in all times, but instead are subjected to two idiots standing there, not sure what to do, basically saying, “man, we sure suck at everything.” I’m, uh, not sure it’s them who whizzed this one down their leg, Mr. Wright.

The End

“There’s a good movie buried in there, somewhere,” isn’t just a cliché, it’s a Wes Andersen-obsessed first-year French Literature major on an exchange program in Paris taking a break from working on their debut novel to punch out an ironically faux-autobiographical short story about a cliché, but I’m not smart enough to scale this particular rampart from any other direction so: yeah, there’s a good movie buried somewhere in Soho. May seem weird to say that after all the ranting, but it’s true: the film is wonderfully shot; the first few time-travel sequences are great, as is the opening dancing sequence, both edging their kitsch so masterfully with portent and ugly that even the most luscious recreations of Swingin’ London never forget to creep you the fuck out; the characters, even as they fail to come together into fully-fledged people, still feel unique, and considered, and not ripped lazily from some catalogue of stock protagonists. Edgar Wright’s specialty has always been these little details whose inclusion in the runtime serve to elevate a movie from the pleasantly forgettable to one of the jewels of your Blu-Ray collection, and although it’s done clunky as fuck here there’s at least an unmistakable craftsmanship to the weird. And the dude deserves credit for dislodging his mind from the comforts of his usual obsessions and trying instead to refract his vision through a different lens, one that has long been a blind spot in his cultural horizon.

But nothing ever comes together – falls the fuck apart, in fact – because he constantly either doesn’t lean into his woke commentary enough or does so far, far too much, the result being a weird lump of a movie that at times grates with its try-hardiness and at others makes a mockery of its own attempted didacticism with every swing back towards childish genre thrills. When your protagonist reaches the conclusion that “the rapists who constitute the killer’s victims were monsters who deserved to die horribly! except not! but also yes! And the woman who offed them was totally in the right! except not! but also yes! also that police officer could have saved me weeks of grief by just telling me his fucking name,” you, uh, missed the thematic off-ramp in a pretty bad way, possibly rolled your Range Rover off the side of the highway in the attempted course correction.

Wright wants to fold the #metoo movement into the delirium of his genre cinephilia so he can Be an Ally while also clapping his hands and laughing at exploitative thrills, which isn’t wrong out of hand (Pam Grier and Rudy Ray Moore movies do this all the time!) but the attempt is handled so disastrously as to be borderline offensive. The wacky little Englishman’s heart is in the right place, though, and I always hate when a person’s work is spiked like a volleyball into the center of the Earth with no reference made to the sincerity of the attempt, so we’re left instead with this: as an exercise in widening the scope of his storytelling to include characters and experiences previously invisible to him Last Night in Soho is a shaky but admirable first step forward, but as both a social statement and a feature film meant to entertain it’s another, more disappointing first in Edgar Wright’s career – a failure.