Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Thomasin McKenzie still needs a truly high profile role that spreads far and wide her astounding talent. She first impressed with her incredible performance as a teenager living off the grid with her dad in Portland, Oregon in Leave No Trace (2018), a very good movie that not enough people saw. She’s impressive enough as a young British woman headed off to fashion school in London in Last Night in Soho that she is quite convincingly just a mousy English girl—she doesn’t turn any heads, which is precisely what the role calls for. If only people knew, in the case of both these films, that she is neither American nor British; McKenzie was actually born in, and started her acting career in, New Zealand. You would just never know it in these other roles because she’s simply that good—and she’s still all of twenty-one years old.

Her performance is easily the best thing about Last Night in Soho, which is, to its credit I guess, as entertaining as it is confusing. Director Edgar Wright is famous for his delightfully cheeky comedies like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), but although Last Night in Soho tracks with his affection for tweaking genres, it’s also much more straightforward than his usual work. There is no satire, or comedy of any kind, here. Instead, he mixes a heavy sense of sixties nostalgia, arguably misplaced as nostalgia often tends to be, with straight up horror. This movie does offer a pretty significant twist within its last half an hour or so, although I can’t quite decide whether I like it. It’s clever, but maybe too much so.

Furthermore, the conceit lacks clarity. Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise, the young woman overwhelmed by her new arrival to London, which this movie literally calls “a bad place.” There’s no romanticizing the big city here. After she finds student housing untenable, she moves into a room for rent in a large old house in the old red light district. As soon as she moved into this house, and meets its old lady landlord (Diana Rigg, whom you may recognize as Olenna “Tell Cersei it was me” Tyrell from Game of Thrones), I kind of wished the movie had just started at that point. Edgar Wright spends quite a bit of time on Ellie and her grandmother (Rita Tushingham), then on Ellie and her classmates, spending far more energy than necessary on the establishment of their characters.

And then, we discover, this house Ellie has moved into is haunted—in a sense. Each time Ellie falls asleep, she is transported to 1960s Soho, and she follows the story of a young aspiring performer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, her talents honestly fairly wasted in this part, aside from her looking stunning most of the time). How her story unfolds in such a linear fashion, picking up where it left off each time Ellie goes back to bed, makes little sense. And when we first meet Sandie, Ellie sees her reflection in a mirror, suggesting she is playing the part of Sandie in these visions. Except that she ultimately exists in these visions as separate from her, sometimes as another reflection in a mirror—sometimes actually mirroring Sandie’s movements, sometimes not—and other times just standing in the same room. Whatever the rules are to how these “visions of the past” work have no consistency, and I found it distracting.

There’s plenty I still liked about Last Night in Soho, though. It looks fantastic. It has very impressive editing, when sometimes we see Taylor-Joy onscreen and sometimes we see McKenzie, within the same scene in which they are embodying the same person. The issue I have there is the complete absence of explanation for what’s happening to Ellie. Is she being possessed? It doesn’t seem so. Then what is happening to her, exactly? It’s not even like it’s just a haunted house, as these visions follow Ellie to other parts of London (or at least Soho). It’s a lot easier for me to appreciate a film when it has a through line of logic.

We do get a key supporting part by Terence Stamp, always a welcome presence. That man is 83 years old now and I’m beginning to wonder how many more good movie roles we’ll get out of him. His exit from the movie is disappointingly unceremonious, and the story would have benefited from at least a brief follow-up.

Last Night In Soho is like a minor emotional roller coaster, in that it skates close to tediousness, and then becomes compelling, and then offers a climactic twist that gets you thinking it was worth the wait. Once the twist settles into its own clarity, though, it leaves a bit to be desired. I do love that this is ultimately a story about women, and women make up all but just a couple of notable speaking parts. That alone makes it worth supporting, especially considering the movie isn’t bad; it just falls short of its potential. If nothing else, it should easily satisfy horror fans without a penchant for critical thinking.

Overall: B