October Horror Challenge 2022 #98: "Last Night in Soho"

I heard a few things about this movie before I saw it, but I managed to mostly avoid spoilers as much as I could. I knew it had something to do with a woman who finds herself mysteriously able to travel through time to the 1960s. I also knew that the cast included Anya Taylor Joy, who has become something of a scream queen in recent years, with roles in movies like The Witch and Split, and I really like her so I was excited to see her in this movie and see what she does with the role.

In this movie, Eloise (Ellie) is a young woman who dreams of becoming a fashion designer. She is in love with the swinging fashion and music of the 60s. Her mother, who was also a designer, committed suicide when Ellie was a child. Ellie sometimes seems to see her mother's ghost in mirrors. When she first moves to London, she finds herself living among some classic mean girls, so she moves into a studio apartment where she can live by herself. One day, she finds herself mysteriously able to enter the 1960s, where she encounters a dazzling, larger than life wannabe singer. Be careful what you wish for however, because the glamour begins to crack and splinter into something much darker than she could have ever imagined.

I got major "Carnival of Souls" vibes from this movie, which is interesting, because that's a horror movie from the 60s, the decade with which Ellie is obsessed in this movie. in "Carnival of Souls," a woman is in a car accident and she starts to have strange visions of figures following her everywhere she goes, ghoulish figures with black eyes and gaping mouths. In "Last Night in Soho," Ellie starts to see visions of faceless men that blend together and shapeshift as they come towards her, arms reaching, trying to grab her. This movie also serves serious "Suspiria" vibes, as flashing neon lights and shadows bland together to create a trippy, mind-bending set of visions that make it hard to tell exactly what is fantasy and what is reality.

This kind of movie is rough on my migraines, because the flashing lights really do a number on me (I used to call "Suspiria" the migraine movie because any time I watched it I was almost sure to get a migraine from all the flashing lights). Halfway through "Last Night in Soho" my eyes were already throbbing. I'd hate for someone with epilepsy to watch this movie and go into a seizure because of all the flashing lights. The plot is twisty and turny, and Ellie isn't the most reliable narrator. I figured out what was going on before the movie revealed the plot twist, but it's like watching a beautiful trainwreck, you can see it coming but there's nothing you can do to stop it while it barrels down the track toward the inevitable conclusion. The movie is absolutely beautiful, visually stunning, and though it's hard to follow the plot because of the unreliable narrator, the movie is rewarding enough if you stick it out until the end.