116 min | R | October 29, 2021 | Focus Features
A grieving fashion student moves to London and starts slipping into the body of a 1960s singer every time she sleeps. The dream is glamorous until it curdles into a nightmare she cannot wake from. Edgar Wright builds a gorgeous haunted house and then keeps adding rooms until he loses the floor plan.
Eloise Turner leaves rural Cornwall to study fashion in London. She is sensitive, isolated, and prone to visions of her dead mother. At night she dreams herself into the life of Sandie, an aspiring singer chasing stardom in 1965 Soho. The film presents itself as a swooning love letter to a glamorous decade and then pulls that decade apart to show the rot underneath. This is a movie about how nostalgia lies and how the women who lived through the past paid for the men’s good time.
Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise as a raw nerve, watchful and fragile and increasingly unable to tell waking from sleep. She lets the fear build in small registers before it overtakes her. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Sandie with ambition that hardens into desperation. Her face does the heavy lifting as the dream sours and her wide-eyed hope collapses into something cornered. Matt Smith plays Jack with a predator’s charm that he sheds one layer at a time. Diana Rigg, in her final role, plays the landlady Ms. Collins with flinty authority and a guarded history.
Edgar Wright directs from a script he wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, and his obsession with the period is the film’s engine. The standout craft is the mirror work in the early dream sequences. Eloise watches Sandie through reflections and then becomes the reflection, with the two actresses trading places in continuous camera moves that hand the body back and forth without a cut. Chung-hoon Chung lights Soho in pools of saturated red and blue neon that turn the city into a fever. The needle-drop soundtrack and the production design sell the fantasy so well that the horror arrives as a betrayal.
The problem is that Wright cannot land what he sets up. The first half conjures dread with discipline and the second half abandons it for shrieking ghosts and a plot twist that explains too much and means too little. The film raises real questions about exploitation and then resolves them with a tidy reveal that flattens its own ideas. The craft never falters even as the story loses its nerve. This is an ambitious genre swing that nails the swing and misses the contact.