As a director, Edgar Wright is good at holding an audience's attention. Whatever his movies' flaws - and you could argue his Hollywood films (Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver) have their issues - he never forgets to make his films entertaining. But sometimes being an entertainer works against you. Some stories need a bit of a edge if they're going to have an impact.
Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) - Ellie to her friends, of whom she seemingly has none as she lives in a small town 60's timewarp with her gran - has just been accepted into the London College of Fashion. It's a dream come true... though no sooner has she arrived than she begins to realise she has been living in a dream, as the youth of today are brash, noisy, and consider her 60s affectations somewhat naff.
Fortunately she discovers a surprisingly cheap bedsit apartment in the heart of Soho, promptly moves in, and suddenly starts having nightly dreams in which she's transported back to the actual 60s, where she haunts wannabe singer Sandie Collins (Anya Taylor-Joy). It's everything she hoped London would be, and a marked contrast to the dour real world around her - until things start to go wrong.
Writer-director Wright establishes early on that Ellie is either psychic or nuts (she sees her dead mother, who killed herself after the stress of London life became too much - uh oh). The main thrust of the story is Ellie's rapid unraveling once Sandie's swinging 60s life turns grim under the "guidance" of her "manager" (Matt Smith). Wright has the visual skills to pull off a psychological thriller-slash-urban fantasy-slash-horror film with ease and this is never less than fun, but the story he's telling stumbles more than once.
This is the kind of film where there's plenty of careful foreshadowing to answer the audience's questions once the (many) twists play out, but little effort put in to creating a realistic protagonist we can care about. Even for an isolated country teen, Ellie's remarkably uninterested in asking basic questions, let alone using google to get answers about what's going on around her; her shock at the realisation that Soho in the 60s was actually a grimy den of sleaze leaves her seeming fatally naive (especially as "nostalgia is bad" is the closest thing to a theme this has), while her extended real-world breakdown features at least one public freak-out too many.
Wright's always been a director interested in style over substance - when there's been substance - but here his drive to keep the twists coming actively undermines the story going on underneath the shocks. The message in 2021 that men are abusive sex pests is both predictable and impossible to argue against; Wright tries to use that to blindside the audience, but whatever he gains in surprise he loses in impact.
Fortunately, the cast are entertaining throughout, with McKenzie's performance going a long way towards making Ellie seem like someone who might actually exist. Wright's visual skills create a series of always entertaining scenes, especially early on in his recreated 60s Soho, and while there's never any real suspense on offer it's still a gripping roller coaster ride. Twists and turns this has; heart, not so much.
-Anthony Morris
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