Last Night in Soho · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl stands at a mirror in a Soho club in 1965 and the girl looking back is not her. Ellie has come to London from Cornwall to study fashion, has fallen asleep in a rented bedsit, and is now descending a mirrored wall into the sound of a band, with Sandie keeping pace in the glass beside her. Then the dancing starts. Jack's hands pass across the frame and the woman in his arms is Ellie, then Sandie, then Ellie again, one continuous movement, no cut you can catch.

Hold that shot, because it is not a flourish. It is the film's entire proposition, and it is very close to what Gilles Deleuze called the crystal-image.

Here is the plain version. In most movies you can always sort what you see into two bins: what is actually happening, and what is virtual — a memory, a dream, a reflection. The crystal-image is the shot where the sorting fails and the two become impossible to tell apart. Deleuze found it most often in mirrors, in Welles and Ophüls, where a reflection stops being a copy of the real thing and starts trading places with it. Edgar Wright's specific invention is to have built that indiscernibility out of bodies rather than software. The swap sequences were engineered with choreography, doubles and mirror rigs, not face replacement, and Paul Machliss cut them frame-precise to period records. That choice does real work. A digital swap is something you decode after the fact. A danced swap is something you lose track of while it is happening, which is the only honest way to film a woman who cannot tell whose life she is inside.

Now the question that lens opens up, and it is a better question than "is nostalgia dangerous." What is Ellie actually in? Not a flashback. Deleuze has a name for the dated, owned flashback — the recollection-image — and this isn't one, because Ellie has no memory of 1965. She wasn't born. Deleuze, following Bergson, argued that the past doesn't sit behind us as a filing cabinet of former presents; it coexists with the present in vast regions, sheets-of-past, and we leap into a region first and only then find anything particular in it. Ellie leaps into a sheet that was never her present. That is exactly what inherited history feels like, and it is why the film's argument about the entertainment economy's predation lands as more than a theme. Sandie's exploitation is not Ellie's memory. It is her inheritance, the region she moved into when she moved to Soho, and it was there in the walls before she arrived.

What she does inside that region is almost nothing, and this is deliberate. Deleuze's world-movement: the character goes still while the world moves around her, the dancer absorbed by the dance instead of originating it. Wright came to this film off Baby Driver, with a whole grammar for cutting bodies to records. Here he uses that machinery to take agency away rather than grant it. And the staging keeps Ellie at a membrane throughout: behind glass, in mirrors, in doorways. She becomes what Deleuze calls the-seer, a watcher rather than an agent, trapped in a pure optical situation where looking is available and acting is not. Most horror runs on the sensory-motor circuit: the thing comes, you run. Soho's dread is a different animal. It is the dread of witnessing something in perfect detail that finished sixty years ago.

Two more machines are running. Chung-hoon Chung's neon is affective colour, colour that absorbs a scene instead of decorating it — the reds and blues do the feeling, and the same jewel-toned scheme that seduced you in the first act reads as fever in the third. That debt is precise: Argento's Suspiria established horror lit in saturated primaries detached from any realist source, and Chung reproduces the grammar. Meanwhile the sound design pushes past voices, footsteps and records into images of present-day London, so Ellie's ear is in 1965 while her eye is in 2019. Deleuze called that split audiovisual-disjunction, and it is the mechanism by which her narration stops being reliable. The film never announces that she is unmoored. It just desynchronizes her senses and lets you notice.

Which brings us to the most contested thing about the movie, the late reversal that recodes who was victim and who was something else. Read as screenwriting, it can feel like a wrench. Read as form, it is the crystal completing. Deleuze describes a variant he calls crystal-decomposition: an ordered, glamorous world discovered to be rotting from inside, where the polish is the rot's outer surface. Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns build a 1960s Soho meticulous enough to fall for precisely so it can turn. And the reversal itself is a crystalline-description, an image that composes its object and then replaces it with another. What Ellie saw wasn't false. It was a version, and the film exchanges it. You can dislike the exchange. The mirrors have been preparing you for it since the first night.

The lineage is unusually legible. Polanski's Repulsion supplied the method of staging a young woman's psychic collapse as architecture rather than exposition, hands coming out of walls. Powell's Peeping Tom made the apparatus of looking into the instrument of harm, and Soho inherits that ethical knot with a woman at both ends of it. Argento's Deep Red hid its clue in a reflection, in plain sight, which is the trick Wright industrializes into his match cuts. Roeg's Don't Look Now taught the associative cut where a colour bleeds across time and a premonition arrives before its event. And Blow-Up gave two things at once: the mod Swinging-London milieu Wright reconstructs, and the plot about scrutinizing images for evidence of a killing. Ellie is Thomas with a mirror where the darkroom used to be.

Then there is the casting, which is the film's smartest formal move. Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham, Diana Rigg. These are not homage decor. They are bodies out of the sheet, actual 1960s British cinema walking into a 2019 frame, aged, still here, and Rigg anchors the turn in her final performance. The past is not reconstructed in this film. It is present and it has grown old.

What Soho hands forward is a demand on its own cycle. If you want to indict period longing, the longing has to work first; the palette has to seduce before it can poison, or you have only made an argument. Watch it again and watch the mirrors before anything happens in them. The film keeps trading which woman the camera is with, and it never tells you when.