YMMV / Last Night in Soho

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Sandie. Is she as simply an innocent young woman corrupted by 60s London and Jack exploiting her starry-eyed naiveté, finally driving her to killing in self-defense and eventually justified vengeance? Or was she an arrogant young woman who was so convinced of her specialness and so determined to live a flashy London lifestyle that she willfully ignores the many red flags, which ends with her in an unsafe and horrible situation, then outright refusing help when it's offered by Lindsay, who she knows is a cop and therefore could likely provide her with a way out of her circumstances? Lindsay himself tells Eloise her perception of Sandie as some complete innocent is incorrect and much of the film's message is the damage and dangers of idolizing the past which Sandie represents. The ending where she fully intends to murder Eloise (a young girl also going through the trauma of the big city, whose theories no one has taken seriously, and is right about to leave therefore taking any further risk of suspicion with her) even going so far to describe how she'll make it look like a suicide since everyone already "expected" Eloise to kill herself, certainly paints her in a very dim light. She also comments, however, that "Sandie" died when she killed Jack, and Lindsey too believes that "Alex" killed "Sandie", so the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
  • While certainly Jack deserved his death, it's somewhat more gray with the dozens of other men Sandie murdered in cold-blood. We are not seeing them abusing her, or actually witnessing Jack's abuse of her. Though they don't seem to particularly care about her, they might not be aware of her situation and believe she is actually doing her own free will. The situation can get even more muddled when you consider that the murders begin after Jack is dead, and it's possible that at least a portion of them were new clients who never even saw Jack and believed Sandie to was completely in control (an assumption that, at that point, wouldn't even be incorrect). We don't even know if those men were in relationships, so it's likely that they weren't even cheaters or adulterers (and even if some were, murder would be a tad excessive as a punishment).
  • In the climax, does Eloise choose not to kill Sandie simply because she doesn't want to continue this cycle of violence while also feeling sympathy for her situation or does she truly believe all those men deserved their fate? When Sandie says, "They deserved it," Eloise replies, "I know," does she mean it or is she telling the psychotic serial killer who was just attempting to murder her what she wants to hear? Or is she just reluctant to kill someone, and still fixated on "saving" Sandie? Does she simply not want to be like Sandie, even if killing in self-defense would be justified?
  • Is the ending of Eloise seeing Sandie in the mirror a happy moment showing Sandie finally happy and free from all the darkness she experienced in life or a slightly sinister one, given the creepy music cue, perhaps implying Eloise truly hasn't let Sandie or at least the darkness she represents go and it will continue to haunt and perhaps negatively influence her in the future? Or maybe it's a sign that, even if the darkness of what happened can not be just left behind, Ellie can learn to live with it instead of being destroyed by it, and her seeing Sandie in the daylight instead of being haunted by the visions shows her taking control?
  • The old man disappears from the plot after he dies and is revealed to not be Jack's future self, and the scene with his younger self suggests he was trying to help women like Sandie escape a life of prostitution, but a lot of his behaviour towards Ellie still comes off as creepy, even knowing that he's not actually who she suspects he is. Was he truly Good All Along, or was he just another creep like the cab driver who happened to not be a murderer?
• Angst? What Angst?: Six months after the climax, John apparently has no angst whatsoever about how he got stabbed and nearly died trying to help Ellie. Given how erratic her behaviour was, including what happened when they were about to sleep together, he's astonishingly forgiving and accepting of everything.
• Anvilicious: In both the present-day narrative and the 1960s flashbacks, the film is far from subtle with its emphasis on how easily young women can be exploited and abused by men. Eloise and especially Sandie are frequently harassed by predatory, usually older gentlemen, which makes Eloise paranoid and untrusting while Sandie is driven to murdering her abusers. Especially when Eloise goes to report Sandie's murder, and it's the male cops who laugh about her (for obvious reasons) and the female one is the only one who listens to her. On the other hand, John is a staunch ally, even at great personal risk, the creepy old man turns out to be a retired cop trying to investigate That One Case, and Sandie Collins turns out to be pretty toxic herself.
• Awesome Music: Edgar Wright's skill in selecting songs to feature in his soundtracks is evidenced here, but special mention goes to Anya Taylor-Joy's covers of '60s-era songs, such as her slow and sultry performance of "Downtown", as well as "You're My World", which opens with high violin notes reminiscent of the "Psycho" Strings, creating a song that's at once elegant and subtly unsettling.
• Broken Aesop: Played with more nuance than it might appear:
  • The film has a powerful message about how women are too often dismissed and disregarded by authority figures as hysterical... that it undermines its climax. When Ellie goes to the police to report Sandie's killing by Jack, the officer doesn't believe a word, asking if she has a history of schizophrenia, if she was drugged, and if she's experimented with hallucinogens before outright dismissing her. Except he's right: the murder she's claiming occurred never happened. Eloise was delusional, her vision of Sandie's murder was at best her misinterpreting one of her visions and at worst a bona fide hallucination from being drugged by Jocasta. Furthermore, Eloise goes full You Have to Believe Me!, but all she can offer in the way of proof boils down to Suspect Is Hatless and claiming that she saw ghosts enact it in a psychic vision. Granted, the cop was Right For The Wrong Reason, but then it further turns out that the real murderer was in fact Sandie herself, further undermining the film's message.
  • However, the characters so far were antipathetic to Eloise at best and unnerving to her at worst (sans John), with few reliable authority figures who are capable of understanding her situation. The film's ending, with Eloise having a successful career, means that even if she was hampered down due to mental illness or supernatural visions, she still triumphed at the end. It helps that her last vision was of Sandie, and by that point she's fully aware of her past troubles, with the entire case chalked up to a burning house with a presumably unwell old lady who might've had a run in with the cops before.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • Ms. Collins' open dislike of men coupled with her passing resemblance to Sandie makes it easy to guess that they're one and the same. Likewise, a viewer aware of Diana Rigg's fame as an actress will probably suspect that she couldn't merely be playing a supporting character with a few lines, cluing them in to the fact that her role is more important than it seems.
  • That the old man is Jack is such an obvious Red Herring that ultimately it would have probably been more surprising if he was, in fact, the real deal.
  • The aforementioned reveal about Mrs. Collins alongside with some Spoiled by the Format given that the movie still has thirty minutes to go after Sandie supposedly dies, makes it easy to guess that she killed Jack instead of the other way around. And that she went further is also not hard to see coming, to the point that it's easy to wonder if it was supposed to be a twist at all, since the movie even foreshadows it: When Eloise is researching deaths during the year she believes Sandie's tragedy happened, she keeps finding only man after man disappeared.
• Complete Monster: Jack is a vile pimp hiding under the façade of a handsome gentleman in the underworld of 1960s London. Offering to become the manager to the young singer Alexandra "Sandie" Collins, Jack begins forcing her to sleep with his clients—as he is implied to have done to other girls—and abuses her when she resists. Eventually forcing Sandie to give herself to over one hundred predators, Jack attempts to viciously stab her to death when she pushes back one too many times.
• Epileptic Trees: Some fans have theorised that Eloise's romance subplot with John was partly put in because, without it, the film is repeated scenes of Ellie dreaming about a glamorous young woman and becoming obsessed with her...as her sanity slowly goes. So possibly to avoid criticism for implying the Psycho Lesbian trope, they threw in a canon attraction to men, and just let the Les Yay be subtext. It also keep the film from having every single significant man be a creep or indifferent before the reveal that the Gentleman is just Creepy Good.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Eloise is paired canonically with John. However, it is more popular, at least in fanfiction, to ship her with Sandie. The fact that Eloise spends the film seeing flashbacks to Sandie's younger life, tries to solve her supposed murder, and that Sandie's ghost ends up watching over Eloise at the end certainly helps. It also doesn't hurt that Sandie is played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The first time we see Sandie, she's wearing a pink dress, which, coupled with her blonde hair, gives her something of a resemblance to Princess Peach if she was around for the mod era. Around a month before the movie came out, Anya Taylor-Joy (Sandie) was announced to be voicing Peach in the 2022 Super Mario Bros. animated movie.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Sandie may be a serial murderer but after you see what she went through you can empathize with her anger.
  • The ghosts of the men Sandie killed. None of them except for Jack outright try to hurt anyone, and are clearly terrified at the end when Sandie bursts into Eloise's room with the knife. When they grab Eloise it's only to ask her to help them, and while they ask her to kill Sandie, given that Sandie was about to murder an entirely innocent Eloise herself and brutally murdered them, you can see where they're coming from. Also, we don't know if all these men were truly rapists or just regular men paying for sex, which while many people find immoral, most don't view it as worthy of death.
• Magnificent Bitch: Sandie, known in present as Alexandra Collins, was an aspiring singer whose music was stolen from her by the callous pimp Jack. Having killed Jack to defend herself, Sandie lured up the abusive men who had raped and hurt her, killing them all and hiding their bodies under her property. Expertly luring many to their deaths, the elderly Sandie wins the heroine Ellie Turner's trust and later almost kills her and her boyfriend John to protect her secrets. Succumbing to remorse, Sandie chooses to die rather than face the courts and at the end is shown to still watch over Ellie as a spirit, free from bondage and her past at last.
• Narrowed It Down To The Guy I Recognise: It's difficult to believe that a film would cast the legendary Diana Rigg as an uptight, but otherwise unimportant landlady. And rightfully so.
• Nightmare Retardant: The faceless men who keep haunting Eloise never manage to be scary, due to a combination of Special Effect Failure and that their design is really just a step above a Bedsheet Ghost.
• Padding:
  • The second act has been criticized for consisting of a little too many repetitive scenes of Eloise having scary visions and running away, with the stakes being unrevealed until she witnesses Jack's apparent murder of Sandie. The Halloween sequence in the club could probably have been deleted without affecting the story.
  • The scene where Eloise has a vision in the library and nearly stabs Jocasta does not tell the audience anything they don't know already, and bizarrely is never followed up on - since Ellie never gets in trouble with university staff for it.
  • John and Eloise's romance is sweet and refreshing given the ugliness of Sandie's experiences with men but it doesn't really move the plot, add to the narrative, or even influence Eloise's character, his scenes could all likely be removed and the film wouldn't be any different.
    • Alternately, without Eloise's attempt to have sex with him, she might never have had the vision of Sandie's 'murder'. And without him, Mrs. Collins would certainly have gotten away with killing Eloise.
• Realism-Induced Horror: Although the film has supernatural aspects with the ghosts of Sandie's abusers haunting Eloise, the story at its core is about an innocent young woman that moves to a big city and is manipulated and exploited by cruel, abusive men, which can and far too often does happen in real life. It doesn't help matters that this casual danger is not only shown in the '60s flashbacks, but also carries over into the modern day, as Eloise ends up in similarly unsettling situations and is anxious and paranoid even before the film's ghostly elements are introduced.
• Special Effects Failure: When Ellie is pounding on the mirror in an attempt to break through it and grab hold of Sandie, she's clearly miming it and "striking" an empty space.
• Spiritual Successor: To Crimson Peak, due to the ghosts tormenting the protagonist being less malevolent than expected. They either try to warn the protagonists or cry for help and indirectly and up helping the protagonists, be it distraction or forcing a Heel Realization from the villain.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Lindsay in both the present and past.
  • In the present he's supposed to be a red herring with Eloise assuming he was Jack, Sandie's abusive pimp and supposed murderer, but shows up so briefly it can come across as an obvious fake-out to the audience either due to being too on the nose or so minimal he barely registers as an option. Also his behavior is so creepy it feels as if the writers were purposefully making him as suspect as possible, meaning the reveal he was totally innocent and actually one of the few good people who tried to help Sandie and likely many other women in similar situations throughout his life, might not feel believable since he seems to go out of his way to be legitimately unsettling for no reason, rather than his actions being misunderstood by Eloise's paranoia.
  • In the past he has a single scene barely two minutes long as the only person, male or female, Sandie interacts with who is genuinely trying to help her and actually believes she's better than what she's sunk too, the inverse of Jack who pretended to treat her special and want to help but simply was tricking her into trusting him long enough to trap her into prostitution. His presence would not only provide a good balance and contrast to all the bad or at very least uncaring men Sandie deals with but also highlight either how trapped Sandie is (her attempting to take up his offer and then being prevented, most likely by Jack) or how far gone she is (she refuses because she truly now has been entirely corrupted).
  • Some also believe Lindsay might have been in love with Sandie given his response to Eloise when she dyes her hair and begins to dress like Sandie. Given he was a vice cop who specialized in the red light district who must have encountered easily hundreds girls like Sandie his immediate and intense reaction to a girl who just happens to resemble one woman he saw decades ago could be read as a man seeing someone who reminds him of a lost love and/or might even be her granddaughter which is why he asks Eloise what her mother's name was. It would give his constant interest in Eloise even another layer he might feel since he could not protect or save Sandie he wants to make up for it by protecting Eloise.
  • John. He's a genuinely nice and kind guy...and that's all we ever learn about him, as his presence is a footnote in the film despite being one of the people most willing to be kind and ready to help Eloise, to the point he comes across as a satellite love interest.
  • Jack does get a few scenes to showcase himself as a charming gentleman, but once the veil is lifted, he only gets a couple of not heavily focused on moments where his facade has lifted and he shows his true nature. Sandie is the focus of these scenes rather than him and it would have been interesting to have a full sequence dedicated to his disturbing shift in character, either being shown or just presented. Whilst Matt Smith has the opportunity to play against type, he is only given the chance to play the seemingly likable Jack in a few scenes and not the real monstrous one in any full single scene. The most we see is him chasing Sandie and trying to kill her.
• Unnecessary Makeover: Eloise gives herself a makeover to completely resemble Sandie. The blonde hair makes it harder to distinguish between the two in the flashbacks. While one could argue it does have plot relevance - setting up Lindsay as a Red Herring and cluing in Ms. Collins that Ellie knows about her, both could have happened in other ways. It's possible this is the Intended Audience Reaction, since Ellie has reverted to her brown hair at the end as a sign of character growth.
• The Woobie:
  • Eloise is being functionally stalked and harassed the entire film by specters from the past, and no one is able to see what she sees or really help her beyond the occasional sympathetic ear. This is in addition to the stress of the fashion school projects and Girl Posse bullying. By the end she is on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown and looks like she hasn't slept in a month.
  • John is the only person in London who is consistently kind and patient with Eloise. For his trouble, he gets his feelings hurt repeatedly by Eloise's struggles with her visions. He also gets physically hurt to the point of blood loss twice, once when Eloise throws him into her bedroom mirror (where he walks over the broken glass while barefoot) and once when Ms. Collins stabs him.
• Vanilla Protagonist: More than a few viewers thinks Eloise is an underwhelming protagonist compared to Edgar Wright's more iconic anti-heroes and especially Sandie, due to not having much characterization aside from being a Country Mouse who dreams of being a fashion designer and doesn't fit in with her classmates because of her love of the 60s.

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