In Review: 'Last Night in Soho,' 'Antlers,' 'The Souvenir Part II'

In this week's reviews, Edgar Wright enters an evocative, giallo-inspired portal to '60s London, horror gets elevated, and Joanna Hogg continues her semi-autobiographical journey.

Last Night in Soho
Dir. Edgar Wright
116 mins.

It’s easy to fall in love with the past, but don’t expect the past to return the favor. Our tendency for nostalgia casts bygone eras in a rosy light, both on a personal and cultural level. The best of what’s come before gets remembered and celebrated. The rest gets memory-holed. In fantasies, many of us think of previous eras only in terms of what was most remarkable about them. Imagine, for a moment, navigating them with the wisdom of hindsight. Knowing what you know, you could see the Beatles play the Cavern Club, catch DJ Kool Herc manning turntables in the Bronx, or show up at Sundance in 1991. You’d know all the rules of the place. Maybe you were born too late. Maybe this is where you belong.

Idealized versions of the past have ways of falling apart upon closer inspection, however. Not everything old still glows. Not everyone—because of their sex, their sexual identity, their class, or their skin color—could enjoy the past equally. It’s a place as filled with the awful things people do to one another as the present. That makes it both dangerous and beguiling, as Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), a sensitive young woman of the 2020s with a fixation on the 1960s, discovers in Last Night in Soho, the latest film from Edgar Wright. 

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It might be a lesson learned too late, however. Raised by her grandmother (Rita Tushingham, one of several ’60s British screen icons in the cast) but ready to strike off on her own, Eloise sets off for London with a suitcase filled with homemade retro clothes, a portable suitcase, and a clutch of records by Dusty Springfield, Peter & Gordon, and the Kinks. She’s warned London will be tough, but no one warned her just how tough.

A leering cabbie drops her off just in time for her to meet a roommate (Synnøve Karlsen) so snooty and backbiting that Eloise soon seeks shelter elsewhere, taking a room at a boarding house overseen by longtime resident Miss Collins (Diana Rigg, in her final role), who serves up a list of strict house rules with kindly undertones. There Eloise finds an escape within an escape. Fantasies—or are they something else?—of treading the streets of London in its mid-’60s golden age consume her nights. Eloise alternately observes and becomes Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer seemingly posed to sup at the era’s feast. She quickly finds a manager and a lover in one man, a dandyish character named Jack (Matt Smith). For both Sandie and Eloise, however, the euphoria doesn’t last.

It’s best not to know where Last Night in Soho goes from there, though the selections of influences Wright created for the Criterion Channel doubles as a road map: Black Narcissus, Mario Bava’s luridly colorful fashion giallo Blood and Black Lace, Ingmar Bergman’s identity-blurring Persona, Buñuel’s surreal sexual exploration Belle de Jour. Polanski’s Repulsion is not on the list, but Wright’s mentioned it elsewhere and, like that source, Last Night in Soho depicts a London in which simply being a woman in a world of men is to court danger. 

That’s a heady brew of influences, and if Wright’s film never works quite as well as a psychological study as some of his inspirations, it’s still propulsive and stylish enough to dazzle anyway. Wright remains a commanding presence behind the camera, filling the film with swooping camerawork and aggressive color schemes. (In an especially clever touch, Eloise’s flat is located next to a cafe whose neon sign rhythmically fills her room with all the colors of the French flag.) McKenzie and Taylor-Joy deliver rich performances that begin, appropriately, as a study in contrast but then start to blur. Like Eloise’s journey, it’s great fun before taking a scary turn. Sometimes what’s been memory-holed has a way of escaping to wreak havoc.

It’s also a film that, in the Wright tradition, holds its true genre secret a few reels. Hot Fuzz is a send-up of action films on the surface but a cozy mystery at heart. Last Night in Soho often plays like a horror film, but there’s a clever episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents beneath its surface. An increasingly rattled Eloise finds herself charged with uncovering a mystery—one likely tied to the mysterious stranger (Terrence Stamp) who always seems to find her—if she can prevent herself from falling apart. It’s to Wright’s credit that he keeps the tension ratcheted to the point where her success not only doesn’t seem certain, it looks unlikely. The past, it turns out, doesn’t really want visitors. Those who choose to ignore this may find it impossible to leave. — Keith Phipps

Antlers
Dir. Scott Cooper
99 min.

Antlers is not about some marauding beast that bursts from the body of a human host and impales its victims before savagely devouring them. Please. That sounds disgusting. What it’s really about is the mess that we’ve made of the environment. And the manifestation of shared trauma. And a mythological being conjured into a real-world environment of humble particularity. Frankly, any expectation the film would behave like a common Friday night gorefest is an insult, not when there’s all this important thematic undergirding and legitimate stars like Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons. Award-winning actors do not agree to have the flesh torn from their neck just to give the audience a cheap thrill. 

Or maybe they do, but under the pretense that it matters. Antlers is directed by Scott Cooper, who may be making his first true horror film, but the violence that erupts in earlier efforts like Out of the Furnace, Black Mass, and Hostiles suggests his transition to the genre was inevitable. The connection between all these, as well as Cooper’s debut feature, Crazy Heart, is an interest in the day-to-day grit and grime of American life: the seedy motels and honky-tonk bars of a downscale country tour, the crime-plagued neighborhoods of South Boston, a steel mill in the once-thriving blue-collar hub of Allegheny County. It stands to reason that a horror film may be—okay, let’s use the “e” word here— elevated by such workaday contextualization. 

But Antlers is a mediocrity in the same way Cooper’s other films are mediocrities: The richness of the backdrop doesn’t forgive the clichés in the fore. The opening titles put the environmental messaging front and center, warning of an indigenous spirit unleashed by violations of nature. That mythical spirit is the wendigo, a cannibalistic creature that was previously realized on screen 20 years ago in Larry Fessenden’s film of the same name. Here it’s conjured by a mine carved indelicately into a seaside community in Oregon, where Julia (Russell) teaches elementary school while living with her brother Paul (Plemons), the local sheriff, in the house where they were raised. Julia’s concerns about a troubled young student (Jeremy T. Thomas) are borne out when the beast residing in his attic is unleashed. 

Though the First Nations actor Graham Greene is brought in for a sober account of the mysterious force that’s tearing through town, the film’s investment in Native American folklore feels conspicuously thin, as does a backstory of domestic abuse that connects Julia to her student. Antlers seeks to distance itself from the breed of passable supernatural thriller that it actually is, packed with gruesome scenes of bone-cracking transformation and ravaged bodies. Cooper does well enough with the bloodletting, which is enhanced by his keen sense of place, and most typical B-grade horror movies don’t boast actors like Russell and Plemons, who do their best to legitimize an uneasy sibling kinship similar to You Can Count On Me. But horror isn’t a genre that needs a higher justification, and the quest for legitimacy only drags Antlers down to earth. — Scott Tobias

The Souvenir Part II
Dir. Joanna Hogg
107 min.

At the beginning of Joanna Hogg’s 2019 semi-autobiographical marvel The Souvenir, Hogg’s on-screen surrogate Julie, played by Honor Swinton Byrne, is a young film student who’s pitching a thesis project about the experiences of a boy and his mother in Sunderland, the working-class port city in North East England. The realities of such a story are far removed from her own life as an urban, twentysomething child of privilege, but that’s the attraction, this chance to get outside herself and join the social realist British filmmaking tradition. But when she meets Anthony (Tom Burke), a sophisticate who will become her boyfriend, Julie fumbles in trying to explain the project to him. It’s the first indicator that his voice will be the dominant one in their relationship. 

The Souvenir ends with Julie getting news of Anthony’s death from a heroin overdose. She was late to even know of his addiction—his friends dropped this revelation casually at a dinner party, assuming she knew—and she was flat-footed in figuring out what to do about it, paralyzed by naivety, compassion, and deep insecurity. Anthony’s death was the punctuation mark to a bruising coming-of-age story, inviting us to imagine, perhaps, that Julie would absorb this terrible blow and move on with her life. The final shots of the film, in fact, show her directing what appears to be a stirring monologue from her Sunderland project, though the troubled expression on her face suggests that her mind is elsewhere. 

A follow-up to The Souvenir was neither expected nor demanded—as a piece of IP, it is not exactly Jungle Cruise—but The Souvenir Part II seizes on the opportunity to reexamine the events of the first film from a meta-fictional angle while checking in on how Julie is holding up as a person and as a filmmaker in the wake of Anthony’s death. And to a certain extent, Anthony is still calling the shots from beyond the grave. He may not be around to poke holes in the dry tissue paper of her self-esteem, but the artist in her cannot avoid confronting everything that has happened to her, even if she doesn’t have it remotely sorted out yet. That’s a dangerous way to make movies, especially for a novice on a budget. 

To an extent, The Souvenir Part II is to The Souvenir what Catherine Breillat’s Sex is Comedy was to her Fat Girl: a circling back to a personal story from the perspective of a filmmaker, so we can examine the relationship between a fiction and the process of creating it. But Part II isn’t about the hassles of working on a difficult project, as Sex is Comedy was, but an effort on Julie’s part to use art to sort through the wreckage of a relationship that still disturbs and confuses her. Though there’s some side business on set that links Hogg and Breillat—like their surrogates, both women directors, having their authority undermined by some on the crew—this film is a genuine continuation of the first Souvenir, not a doubling back. Julie is still a work-in-progress, as a person and as an artist, and the film, for all its layering and movies-within-a-movie, simply turns the next page in her life. 

Part II meanders a bit too casually through the aftermath of Anthony’s death, with Julie grieving close to her parents (Tilda Swinton and James Spencer Ashworth), who have no idea how to help her, and paying a visit to Anthony’s folks, who are grateful to see her but had a separate and much longer history with him. The film gets far more compelling when Julie essentially stages the events of The Souvenir as her thesis short, with Ariane Labed playing her alter-ego and Harris Dickinson doing a less persuasive version of Anthony. Julie wants to use the filmmaking process to work out her feelings about this painful relationship, but she has trouble articulating those feelings to her actors, because she isn’t sure about what she was thinking, much less what he might have been. This leads to some awkward, sometimes grimly funny tension on set. 

And then, in the final stretch, Hogg gambles on a major break in form and tone that departs from unadorned naturalism of both parts of The Souvenir, and burrows more abstractly into Julie’s subconscious, with its odd echoes, distortions and refractions. It feels like the sort of radical act that might find yet another angle on the same difficult set of circumstances for the character—the Mulholland Dr.-fication of the Souvenir franchise—but instead it’s a major misstep, throwing quotation marks around a young woman’s life that had felt so unerringly real over the course of one-and-two-thirds movies. Maybe it’ll all get straightened out in Part III. — Scott Tobias