Last Night in Soho

Snapshot

Last Night in Soho is Edgar Wright's first outright horror film and the first he built around a female protagonist, a psychological thriller that folds a contemporary coming-of-age story into a hallucinatory reconstruction of mid-1960s London. Eloise "Ellie" Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), a fashion student newly arrived in the city from rural Cornwall, begins slipping in her sleep into the London of the Swinging Sixties, where she inhabits and observes the life of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer whose glamorous ascent curdles into exploitation and violence. The film's structuring gambit is the collision of nostalgia and horror: the same aesthetic apparatus that makes the past intoxicating — neon, pop records, couture silhouettes — becomes the vehicle for dread. It is at once a love letter to a mythologized London and an argument about the rot beneath its glamour, particularly the sexual predation faced by young women in the entertainment economy. Critically it landed as a divisive work — widely admired for its craft and its two central performances, more contested on the terms of its screenplay and its third-act reversals — and it carries additional cultural weight as the final screen appearance of Diana Rigg.

Industry & production

The film was produced by Working Title Films — Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner's long-running British production house within the Universal orbit — with Wright and Nira Park among the producers, and released by Focus Features in North America and Universal internationally. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021 and opened theatrically in October 2021. Its release therefore fell squarely inside the disrupted, pandemic-shadowed theatrical market, when audience returns for adult-skewing, non-franchise titles were fragile; the film is generally understood to have underperformed commercially, though I'll refrain from citing specific grosses. The project also represented a particular moment in Wright's career: coming off the stylized heist musical Baby Driver (2017), and having previously exited Ant-Man over creative differences with Marvel, he used Soho to move into a darker, more auteurist register while retaining studio backing. The screenplay was co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the Scottish writer then rising on the strength of 1917, whose involvement is often credited with sharpening the film's female interiority — a corrective Wright himself acknowledged the material needed.

Technology

Documentation of the film's exact capture format is one of the places where the public record is thinner than one would like, and I won't assert a specific camera or gauge with false precision. What is well established is the film's commitment to in-camera and practical solutions over digital compositing wherever feasible. The signature time-slip sequences — in which Ellie and Sandie occupy the same mirrored space, trading places as reflections — were engineered largely through choreography, body doubles, and mirror rigs rather than face-replacement VFX, a deliberate throwback to older trick-film craft. Wright has spoken about wanting the audience to feel the physical reality of the illusions. The production also leaned heavily on practical lighting effects, especially the pulsing red-and-blue signage of Soho, to motivate its color transformations optically rather than in the grade alone. Digital tools were used, but the film's technological ethos is one of concealment: making the seams invisible so the artifice reads as haunting rather than as spectacle.

Technique

Cinematography

The film was shot by Chung-hoon Chung, the Korean cinematographer best known for his long collaboration with Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst, Stoker, The Handmaiden). His work here is the film's most consistently praised element: a saturated, high-contrast palette in which Soho's neon does expressive labor, bathing faces in reds and blues that shift with emotional temperature. Chung stages elaborate developing shots and reflection-based compositions, using mirrors, glass, and windows both as tools for the body-swap conceit and as a running visual motif of doubled and fractured identity. The 1960s passages are rendered in a heightened, jewel-toned glamour that the film gradually poisons, so that the same lighting scheme that first reads as seductive later reads as feverish. It is a cinematography of controlled excess, disciplined by the horror architecture underneath.

Editing

Paul Machliss, Wright's regular editor since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and the credited cutter on The World's End and Baby Driver, edited the film. Wright's cinema is famously music-driven, and Soho extends the tight sound-to-image synchronization of Baby Driver into a different key: cuts, camera moves, and performance beats are keyed to period records so that the editing becomes a form of choreography. The mirror-dance sequences in particular depend on frame-precise matching to sell the swap between McKenzie and Taylor-Joy. As the film descends, the editing grows more fragmentary and disorienting, mirroring Ellie's collapsing grip on which timeline she occupies.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Production designer Marcus Rowland (a longtime Wright collaborator) and costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux reconstruct a 1960s Soho of clubs, dance halls, and bedsits that is meticulous and pointedly seductive — the film wants you to fall for the period before it turns on you. Costume carries thematic weight given Ellie's vocation as a fashion student: Sandie's transformation is charted through her clothes, and Ellie's design work becomes literally haunted by what she witnesses. The contemporary London is staged as comparatively drab and alienating, so the past's saturation reads as both dream and trap. The staging repeatedly places Ellie as a spectator pressed against the membrane of the past — behind glass, in mirrors, at thresholds — visualizing the film's concern with looking and complicity.

Sound

Sound is central rather than decorative. The score is by Steven Price, the Oscar-winning composer of Gravity who also scored Baby Driver, and it braids original music with a dense soundtrack of period pop. Anya Taylor-Joy performs a version of Petula Clark's "Downtown," and the film draws on the girl-group and British-Invasion-adjacent pop of the era — the character name Sandie itself nods to Sandie Shaw — deploying these songs first as pleasure and later as menace. The sound design uses the intrusion of past voices, footsteps, and music into Ellie's present as a mechanism of haunting, so that hearing becomes as unreliable as seeing.

Performance

The film rests on its two leads. Thomasin McKenzie plays Ellie as fragile, watchful, and increasingly unmoored, carrying the film's point of view; Anya Taylor-Joy plays Sandie with luminous confidence that is systematically stripped away, and does much of her own singing. Matt Smith is the manager-pimp figure Jack, weaponizing period charm. The supporting cast is layered with icons of British cinema whose casting is itself a citation: Terence Stamp, an emblem of 1960s British film, appears as an ambiguous older man; Rita Tushingham, star of the kitchen-sink landmark A Taste of Honey, plays Ellie's grandmother; and Diana Rigg, in her final role as the landlady Ms. Collins, anchors the film's climactic turn. The film is dedicated to Rigg, who died in 2020.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film operates as a psychological horror-mystery with an unreliable, subjective mode of narration anchored almost entirely in Ellie's perception. Its dramatic engine is the dream-intrusion device: nightly descents into the past that begin as wish-fulfillment and progressively become possession and haunting, until the boundary between eras dissolves and the past bleeds into the present as physical threat. Structurally it moves from coming-of-age realism through immersive fantasy into full horror, before pivoting on a late reversal that recodes the mystery — a whodunit about a woman's fate that reframes victimhood, guilt, and vengeance. This third-act turn is the film's most contested design decision, admired by some as a genre subversion and faulted by others as a tonal and thematic wrench; the disagreement is itself part of the film's reception history.

Genre & cycle

Last Night in Soho sits at a busy intersection of cycles. It is a haunted-city horror and a female-centered psychological thriller in the lineage of the "woman losing her grip in a hostile metropolis" film. It participates in the 2010s–20s wave of "nostalgia-horror," works that interrogate rather than simply indulge period longing, using retro aesthetics to expose historical violence. It is also, self-consciously, a British genre film that reaches back to the nation's horror traditions. Within Wright's own filmography it marks a genre pivot: where his earlier work refracted genre through comedy (the Cornetto Trilogy), Soho commits to horror's affective machinery in earnest, retaining his formalist, music-locked style but abandoning the comic frame.

Authorship & method

The film is a strongly authored Edgar Wright work — formally precise, saturated with cinephilia, structured around music — but its method here is notably collaborative in ways that shape its meaning. Co-writing with Krysty Wilson-Cairns was, by Wright's own account, essential to grounding a story about young women's experience; the screenplay's attention to female subjectivity is often traced to that partnership. Chung-hoon Chung's cinematography imports a Park Chan-wook–adjacent sensibility — lush, mirror-obsessed, morally uneasy — that inflects the film's look well beyond Wright's prior collaborations. Steven Price's score and the curated needle-drops extend Wright's signature integration of music and image. Longtime collaborators Paul Machliss (editing), Marcus Rowland (production design), and producer Nira Park provide continuity with Wright's established working ensemble. The authorship is thus best read as Wright's vision routed through a specific set of collaborators who pulled the material toward darkness, glamour, and interiority.

Movement / national cinema

This is emphatically a British film, and part of its project is a dialogue with British cinema history. It is a Working Title production working London as both subject and myth, and it stitches itself into a specifically British lineage through casting (Stamp, Tushingham, Rigg) and through its engagement with the Swinging Sixties — the very period when "British cinema" became an international brand of youth, fashion, and pop. It also converses with the British horror tradition and with the London-set psychological horror exemplified by Michael Powell and Roman Polanski's British-made Repulsion. The film's national-cinema stance is critical as much as celebratory: it exhumes the exploitation and misogyny that the "Swinging London" image tended to gloss.

Era / period

Two eras are held in tension. The narrative present is a broadly contemporary London — precariously gentrified, alienating, and haunted — while the film's obsessive attention goes to the mid-1960s. Its reconstruction of that period is dense and knowing, but the film's argument is precisely about the danger of period fetishism: Ellie's romance with a decade she never lived is the wound the horror exploits. In production terms it belongs to the disrupted early-2020s theatrical era, a context that arguably shaped its commercial trajectory more than its content. Its "pastness," in other words, is thematized rather than incidental.

Themes

The film's central theme is the peril of nostalgia — the seduction of an idealized past and the historical violence that idealization conceals. From that flow its other concerns: the sexual exploitation of young women in the entertainment and nightlife economy, then and now; the porousness of trauma across time and its transmission between women; the ethics and dangers of spectatorship, encoded in the film's relentless motif of mirrors, glass, and watching; and identity as something doubled, borrowed, and invaded. Fashion and performance run through the film as arenas where female self-expression and female objectification are inseparable. The late reversal complicates the film's own thesis, opening questions about victimhood, complicity, and revenge that critics have read in sharply divergent ways — some as a bold complication, others as a muddying of the film's feminist intentions.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception was mixed-to-positive and markedly split along a fault line: near-consensus praise for Chung's cinematography, Price's music and the soundtrack, Wright's formal control, and the McKenzie–Taylor-Joy performances, set against substantial reservations about the screenplay's structure and especially its third-act revelations, which several critics felt undercut the film's stated concern with women's exploitation. The film also drew poignant attention as Diana Rigg's final performance, to whom it is dedicated.

Influences on the film (backward): the most cited touchstones are Roman Polanski's Repulsion, the London psychological-breakdown film par excellence; Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now for its haunted, precognitive editing; the British-horror tradition and the giallo, particularly the neon-and-color expressionism associated with Dario Argento; and the Powell–Pressburger legacy, with Peeping Tom especially resonant as a British film about the violence of looking. Its casting deliberately cites the 1960s British cinema of Terence Stamp and Rita Tushingham, and its music invokes the girl-group and British-pop soundscape of the era. Wright has been open about the film as a work of cinephile homage, and critics readily identified these lineages.

Legacy (forward): as a relatively recent film, its downstream influence is still emerging, and I won't overstate it. Its clearest place in the culture is within the ongoing nostalgia-horror conversation — films and series that use lovingly reconstructed period aesthetics to interrogate rather than simply indulge the past — where it is frequently invoked as a prominent, ambitious, and instructively divisive example. It further consolidated Anya Taylor-Joy's stardom during her breakout period and marked a significant genre expansion in Edgar Wright's authorship. Its longer-term canonical standing remains unsettled, which is an honest reflection of the record rather than a hedge: the film is likely to be remembered as much for the debate it provoked about nostalgia, gender, and the ethics of its own twist as for any single stylistic innovation.