Photo Courtesy of Jimmy Cork.
College is an adjustment period for everyone, but for first-year fashion student Eloise Turner, (Thomasin Mckenzie) a dream of a glamorous life in the big city quickly turns into a reality-altering nightmare. After a rough first night in her dorm thanks to her mean girl roommate Jocasta (Synnøve Karlsen), Eloise moves into a single room off-campus. On her first night in her new room, she has a “dream” where she inhabits the body of aspiring singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) as she traverses the nightclub scene in early 1966 (the year is never explicitly mentioned but I’m just going off the giant Thunderball poster which appears in an early sequence which premiered in 1965). Eloise, a 60’s fan, is at first enamoured with finally getting to live out the night life she dreamed of but what she sees at night through Sandie’s eyes quickly veers into the disturbing and she soon finds herself hard pressed to distinguish her harsh reality from the frightening past.
The film’s director, Edgar Wright, made his directorial debut with the 2004 Shaun of the Dead, a critically-acclaimed send-up of zombie films. He followed that up in 2007 with the equally-praised buddy-cop comedy Hot Fuzz, then made his first American film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010). Pilgrim was an outright bomb at the box office but has since become a relatively widely-seen film due to a cult following and popularity on streaming platforms. Wright returned to the UK in 2013 to make The World’s End, a pub crawl comedy that I consider to be my favorite film of all time. He followed that up with 2017’s Baby Driver after dropping out of Ant-Man in 2015 due to creative differences with Marvel. Despite a growing popularity with film geeks, Driver is Wright’s only film that can be considered a true box office hit. Unfortunately, judging by my theater at the AMC Lisbon (the film was inexplicably not playing at Waterford or Mystic), which was completely empty notwithstanding me and four friends, it does not seem like Wright has another hit on his hands. That being said, I had a really good time with this one. The first half of the film is relatively tame and scare-free but nevertheless entertaining, keeping me engrossed in the mystery of the film. The film does undoubtedly bring scares towards the end, fully transitioning from a thriller to a ghoulish horror film by the third act. However, there are certainly some elements that don’t quite work. A few stylistic choices towards the climax feel somewhat excessive and out of place and a few characters are disappointingly one-note despite copious amounts of screentime, most notably Michael Ajao’s John, who seems puzzlingly unphased by the physical and emotional abuse he endures throughout the film.
Despite existing in a wholly different genre, many publications including the Los Angeles Times, have compared the film to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, as both films saw pop culture obsessed directors finally getting to make a film set in the decade where they got so much of their musical and cinematic influences from. While Soho has some visually stunning moments, some computer-generated wide shots of period London don’t quite compare to the practical long shots of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth cruising down a fully converted 1969-accurate Hollywood boulevard. Tarantino did directly influence Soho in one key way. Wright revealed in an interview with Total Film magazine that the Pulp Fiction director introduced him to the Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich (yes, that’s their name) song where the film gets its title.
While I’d personally consider Soho to be a lesser effort in Wright’s particularly impressive directorial canon, it has me just as excited to see what the filmmaker does next. Wright revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he has a pitch for the next James Bond film. Wright is clearly a huge fan of the series, having worked with both former Bonds Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan on previous films. The Bond love is evident in Soho as well, outside of the aforementioned Thunderball poster, the late On Her Majesty’s Secret Service actress Diana Rigg appears in the film as Ms. Collins, the landlord of the haunted room Eloise rents, giving a wonderful final performance of her over sixty year-long career.
I’d love to see Wright’s take on Bond but part of me hopes that he sticks with making original films like Soho, Baby Driver, and The World’s End. It’s been wonderful to see movie theaters really come back to life over the past few months but the box office has been overwhelmingly dominated by big franchises, particularly superhero films. Hopefully, the cineplex can continue to be big enough for both Wright’s fresh, weird films and the big Marvel universe he stepped away from.
