Last Night in Soho(2021)
Focus Features Oct 29, 2021 | Wide
Aspiring fashion designer Eloise is mysteriously able to return to 1960s London, where she encounters dazzling wannabe singer Sandie. But the glamour is not as it seems, and the dreams of the past crack and splinter into something darker.
Releases
Original Release | Oct 29, 2021
Box Office Results
Results
$4,178,460
$10,127,625
$12,830,000
$22,957,625
Current Showtimes
Your Location or
(U.S. Only)
Director & Top Cast
Gallery
Technical Specifications
Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos
Aspect Ratio: 2.39 : 1
Other Details
Country of Origin: United Kingdom,China
Language: English
Summaries
Plot Summary
- 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) in a rural house near the town of Redruth, Cornwall, England, UK and has been mourning the recent 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.
Storyline
- In acclaimed director Edgar Wright's psychological thriller, aspiring fashion designer Eloise is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s, where she encounters 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. Fixated on the Swinging Sixties and all things fashion, creative, wide-eyed Eloise has big dreams of becoming a designer. With this in mind, the aspiring young couturier relocates to bustling London to study at the prestigious London College of Fashion, unaware that the big city can be "a lot." Indeed, as brilliance sparks jealousy and the ugly past creeps in, the frail bonds between reality and fantasy start to blur; suddenly, hair-raising visions threaten the dream. A fiercely-talented, effortlessly-seductive, and rapaciously ambitious persona bursting with confidence now emerges, luring ecstatic Eloise into a dazzling world of light and shadow. But success always comes at a price. Who knows what happened last night in Soho? — Nick Riganas Eloise, a fan of '60s music, fashion, and style, is a first-year fashion student in London, but is annoyed by her roommate's constant partying. She finds alternative accommodation at a bedsit in Soho. The arrangement works well, and in her dreams she is transported back to '60s Soho, where her alter ego Sandie is an aspiring singer. Initially this is something special which she anticipates each night, but the dream eventually becomes a sanity-threatening nightmare. — grantss
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