#Thomazin McKensie

[pb-dot]

Why do I never rewatch Last Night In Soho?

Edgar Wright's Last Night In Soho is a strange movie for me. I enjoy a lot of the things it does, the otherworldly sleaze of the lighting, talented actors playing smart characters trying to figure out a mystery, truly jaw-dropping in-camera tricks to portray the impossible, and a saucy twist. It's the kind of movie I'd watch time and time again but somehow, I just can't make myself do it. More musings and Last Night in Soho spoilers under the cut.

Part of it, I suspect, is that Thomasin McKenzie is just too damn good at her job as the protagonist Eloise. She's instantly likable and does the naive enthusiasm of the young and ambitious with such intensity that I find myself entirely unwilling to, as it were, "put her through" the entire cavalcade of fear, humiliation, and doubt of her own sanity that is to follow by actually watching it play out.

It's odd because usually I watch horror movies for that specific niche. I love seeing characters going through fear, pain, and adversity and emerging stronger on the other side. The ghosties, ghoulies, and assorted monsters help to make the scenario sufficiently fictional-feeling, granted, but I get a similar rise from "man against nature/elements"-movies such as Fall.

It could easily be because the main source of horror actually is not the ghosts nor the time-traveling body swapping that lands Eloise in the increasingly unenviable nights of Anna Taylor-Joys fallen starlet Sandie, but rather how incredibly grim the lives of the two women get as the story churns along. Sandie finds herself forced into steadily more degrading sex work, and there are no ghosts or curses in play. The world has just historically been shitty to women, and although Eloise doesn't suffer from the same, she is still belittled, frequently harassed, and gaslit by her supernatural connection and the martial world both.

What really gets to me, I think, is that in the end, Eloise learns that her assumption that Sandie eventually got murdered was faulty and that she instead murdered her pimp boyfriend and several former clients, if not assaulters is the right term here. Not to go all #girlboss here, but frankly, who could blame Sandie? I'm not saying the girl deserves a medal, but surely Sandie is not a villain for this?

It is somewhat ambiguous whether the movie agrees with my take at all, seeing as Eloise's landlady, secretly an older Sandie all along, drugs Eloise and plans to kill her to ensure her crimes stay hidden. It's not an unrealistic reaction to learn your 60's crime spree has been discovered, granted, but it also makes the climax a bit of a bummer.

Eloise and Sandie are in such a powerful position to understand each other at this point. Sandie has been young, beautiful, and hopeful in a hostile city, and Eloise has literally been Sandie. I don't know what sort of peaceful compromise can be reached in this situation but attempted murder and accidental arson seems like a worst-case scenario. The movie to its credit seems to agree that this is a tragic one, but I'll argue that it's not a good tragedy if it isn't inevitable.

The movie does end on a happy note, but it doesn't quite fit, mostly because it didn't seem entirely connected with the rest of the story thematically. It's great that Eloise is doing better, of course, I could watch that girl succeed all day, but it hasn't really been the type of experience she has been having. She has withstood the world revealing itself to be a colder, eviler place than she thought, but she has reached no meaningful synthesis between this fact and her natural optimism. Things just working out for her right now, despite experiencing a small lifetime's worth of trauma and indignities. I guess it's nice if you can get it, but it doesn't feel true to me.

I don't really like to nitpick movies like this, especially movies that I like the vast majority of, but the ending in Last Night In Soho doesn't work for me, and it's probably because of this I haven't gotten around to rewatching it. I feel like there's a version of the movie, at least of the script, out there that I could really enjoy, and that's ever so slightly maddening.