Last Night in Soho
Came out; 2021
Time; 1 hours 56 minutes
Watched: Hulu
Rating; R for bloody violence, sexual content, language, brief drug material and brief graphic nudity
IMDB Rating; 7.1/10
Caution; Spoiler Alert
Staring;
Thomasin McKenzie as Eloise
Anya Taylor-Joy as Sandie
Matt Smith as Jack
Diana Rigg as Ms Collins
Terence Stamp as Silver-Haired Gentleman
Story Line;
Aspiring fashion designer Eloise is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s, where she encounters a dazzling wannabe singer, Sandie. But the glamour is not all it appears to be and the dreams of the past start to crack and splinter into something far darker
Thoughts;
This is so much more than what the story line says. It goes much deeper than what is appears.
The fashion, the music and the visual is all amazing. All the pieces just fit together at the end, it sucks you in and keeps going
CAUTION; Major Spoiler Alert
The
film starts as Eloise "Ellie" Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) is
dancing in her room. She is an aspiring fashion designer who lives
with her Granmother 'Gran Peggy' (Rita Tushingham) and has been
mourning the death of her mother (Aimee Cassettari), who appears to
Ellie in mirror reflections at times. Peggy shows Ellie a letter she
has received informing her she has been accepted into a fashion
school in London. Ellie is excited, but Peggy warns her that there
are bad men up where she is going.
Ellie takes a train to
London and is driven to her room by a local taxi. The taxi driver
(Colin Mace) makes creepy comments to Ellie, so she gets off at a
shop and waits for the man to leave so she can keep walking to her
room. She gets there and meets her roommate Jocasta (Synnove
Karlsen).
Ellie goes out with Jocasta and her friends, where
it is revealed that Ellie's mother died by suicide after a struggle
with mental illness. While in the ladies room, Ellie overhears
Jocasta talking trash about her to the other girls. Ellie leaves the
pub and walks back to her room, spotting an older man (Terence Stamp)
looking her way and smirking. Jocasta later brings a guy back to her
room to hook up with while Ellie tries to sleep. She leaves her room
and finds a party going on outside. The only student to befriend her
is a young man named John (Michael Ajao). The next morning, Ellie
wakes up late and runs to class where she makes it on time for
attendance.
Ellie decides to find a place of her own for peace
of mind. She finds a room in a boarding house kept by an old woman
named Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg). She gives Ellie a set of rules to
follow and allows her to stay in the bedroom upstairs. Ellie likes
the place and rests for the night, sleeping all the way under the
covers, enjoying the quiet.
When Ellie gets out of bed, she
finds herself somehow in the 1960's. She walks into a venue called
Cafe de Paris and sees her reflection as another young woman named
Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Ellie follows Sandie as though she is there
watching everything unfold like an invisible spirit. Sandie wants to
be a singer at the venue but is met with unwanted attention by a
surly patron (Paul Brightwell). She is told to speak to a man named
Jack (Matt Smith) about being a singer. Sandie meets Jack and is
charmed by him. He starts to leave with her when the patron makes
rude comments. Jack punches him in the face and runs away with
Sandie, kissing her in a phone booth, which is reflected as also
happening with Ellie. As Ellie keeps moving, she finds Sandie in her
bed, but when she tries to touch her, she wakes up back in the
present.
At school, Ellie becomes inspired to create a design
based on what she saw Sandie wearing. Jocasta notes a hickey on
Ellie's neck from where Jack had been kissing her/Sandie.
Later
that night, Ellie goes back to sleep hoping to wake up in the 60's
again. She finds herself as Sandie and Jack get closer, and he brings
Sandie to meet the owner of a different venue, the Rialto, so that
she can sing for him, performing the song "Downtown". The
men note that she can definitely sing.
Back in the present,
Ellie dyes her hair blonde like Sandie's and continues to work on her
dress design, which her teacher seems to like, while Jocasta just
mocks her out of pettiness. Ellie later sees the venue where she saw
Sandie perform as it appears in the present day. She then goes to a
pub to ask for a job. As she heads back to her room, the old man who
saw her from the other night follows her and claims to recognize her
because of her hair, but he insists he is not trying to pick her
up.
Ellie returns to the 60's and goes to the Rialto but finds
Sandie is now performing as part of a group of skimpy-dressed women
dancing as backup for a woman performing as a marionette. As Ellie
follows Sandie around a little more, she sees that Jack is more
abusive and is telling her that she has to make certain men happy if
she wants to make it in the music business. Ellie sees Sandie in the
bedroom as a lecherous man approaches her with his pants off. Ellie
screams at the man to not touch Sandie, and he appears to hear her,
but Ellie wakes up. The experience causes Ellie to rip up the pink
dress design she originally drew in class.
Ellie continues to
get through work and school while keeping her excursions to the past
a secret from everyone else. In her next trip to the 60's, she sees
that Sandie is becoming more jaded and unhappy as Jack her forced her
into prostitution and she must service a barrage of horrible men,
while she also develops a drug and alcohol problem. She uses fake
names like "Alex", "Lexie", or "Anna".
Only one man (Sam Claflin) does not take advantage of her and is
polite and charming to her. Sandie talks down about herself while
Ellie tries to get her attention through the mirror. She manages to
smash through the glass and grab Sandie, but she wakes up.
John
sees that Ellie is looking a bit unwell, so he invites her out to a
Halloween party. Jocasta and her friends see them together and give
them drinks. They all start dancing, but in the middle of things,
Ellie hallucinates seeing ghoulish visions of the men who took
advantage of Sandie, as well as Sandie herself dancing alone. John
takes Ellie home when he sees her looking bad. They start to kiss and
go to her room for sex, but Ellie looks up and sees the ceiling
mirror showing Jack attacking Sandie. Ellie starts yelling at him to
get off her. She then appears to see Jack stabbing Sandie to death.
Ms. Collins overhears the noise and orders John to leave, as one of
her rules is not having male visitors. She simply tells Ellie to go
to bed.
The next day, Ellie apologizes to Ms. Collins about
what happened. She asks her if anyone died in her room but Ms.
Collins is dodgy about it. Later, Ellie goes to the library to look
up murders in the 60's. She begins to hallucinate the ghost men
following her around the library, nearly leading her to stab Jocasta
in the face with a pair of scissors. John runs after Jocasta to
explain things while Ellie leaves in a panic. She runs to the police
station to report the murder, now believing that the old man is Jack
and that he got away with killing Sandie, but the detectives know she
has little to go off of.
Ellie arrives late for work and finds
that the old man is waiting for her. She takes out her mobile phone
to try and record a confession out of him, but when she brings up
Sandie, the man says "Alex killed Sandie" and that whatever
happened to her was something she got herself into. Ellie runs after
the man, but he gets hit by a car on the street and dies. Ellie's
boss tells someone to call for help and say he's a former cop named
Lindsay. Ellie realizes the man is not Jack, but rather the gentleman
who was polite with her and didn't sleep with her.
Ellie
returns to her room and makes plans to go back home in the
countryside to live with her grandmother. Ms. Collins gives Ellie tea
and her mail. One letter is addressed to Ms. Collins, revealing her
name to be Alexandra.... which is what Sandie told Jack her name was
short for. Ms. Collins reveals that someone did die in Ellie's room:
her. Ms. Collins was Sandie. After enduring all the abuse in her
life, she let her life as Sandie die when she stabbed Jack to death.
She later got revenge on all the men who abused her by murdering
them. Ms. Collins then reveals that she poisoned Ellie's tea and will
make it look like a suicide. John then comes looking for Ellie, who
regains enough strength to warn John to run. Ms. Collins stabs him
while Ellie tries to run upstairs, seeing the younger Sandie
attacking her. Downstairs, a fire starts and begins spreading. Ellie
locks herself in her room where the spirits of Sandie's victims break
through the floors and walls, begging Ellie to kill Ms. Collins. When
she finally breaks in, she sees her reflection as Sandie and realizes
she has become just as much of a monster as the men who hurt her. She
tries to slit her throat but Ellie stops her and tries to help her.
Ms. Collins chooses to stay and die in the fire while letting Ellie
go. Ellie gets John out of there as medics arrive, and Ms. Collins
allows the flames to consume her.
Sometime later, Ellie
presents her work in a fashion show with Peggy and John in attendance
to cheer her on along with the rest of the audience. Her teacher
congratulates her, as do the other girls (excluding Jocasta who
continues to remain a petty bitch), and she once again sees her
mother's reflection smiling at her. As Peggy and John come to
congratulate her, Ellie sees Sandie's reflection in the mirror waving
at her.
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