‘That’s a lovely name.’
A naive young fashion student called Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) moves to Soho, London and becomes obsessed with the 1960s, but as her obsessions unravel, she sees visions of a glamorous aspiring singer called Sadie (Anya Taylor-Joy). It also stars Terence Stamp, Matt Smith as Jack, Sadie’s pimp, and Diana Rigg as Eloise’s mysterious landlady, in what was Rigg’s final film.
We have all been like Eloise at some point in our lives, thinking that we’re different from everyone else, making our own clothes to make a statement about ourselves, and naively basing our entire personality around a period in relatively recent history, not realising that the 1960s weren’t as glamorous as people think. At first, I thought that this film was going to go The Fight Club route, in the sense that I thought that Sadie and Eloise were alter-egos of one other. Then I thought that the Terence Stamp character was the older version of the Matt Smith character, which would have been surprising but still predictable.
I accidentally went the wrong way and ended up in Soho about a month or two ago, so the unnerving familiarity between the film and real life was a little too close for comfort. The film is trying to be complimentary towards moving Soho into a more artsy but gentrified area, with an undeniable sinister past, but Soho’s supposed revitalisation is one that none of us can trust, especially as the viewer. Like every psychological horror film, it doesn’t start off being horrific- it begins as a social commentary about identity and seeing things, music, and fashion associated with the 1960s through rose tinted glasses and unravels into a film where you can’t tell truth from reality, and you don’t know what to believe.
The level of detail that went into this film was astounding, and fairly trippy at times. We are constantly told in the film that Soho isn’t like it used to be. It is a fairly interesting film which appreciates and gives a disturbing take on the ‘not like other girls’ trope. However, the obvious CGI ghosts throw me out of the believability of the film. Also- if she is a fashion design student (especially one who got accepted into UCL, one of the top creative arts colleges in the UK) whose entire personality is based around loving the sixties, and assuming that the landlady keeps pictures of her younger self around the house, then why didn’t Eloise (in the modern day) see that the landlady looked like an old version of the young Sadie?
Other than that, it was a pretty decent film that defied expectations.
****/*****
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