I’ve been looking forward to this film for a very long time. In fact, this goes beyond pure anticipation, as this film’s existence is tied directly to my big break into this film criticism gig. Long story short, when I got to interview Edgar Wright during the press tour for Baby Driver, he mentioned that he wanted to make a straight-up horror movie one day. For a while, everyone was abuzz about him possibly doing a sequel to Baby Driver which, while I like and is certainly the most technically polished film he's made yet, I wasn’t as hot on as his previous work. No, I was holding out on that raw genre experience, and sure enough, my prayers were answered once news of this film first broke. And even with the curious levels of backlash this has gotten thus far, I am incredibly happy with the end result.
For a start, this is not just horror but head-game psycho-horror, with Thomasin McKenzie’s Ellie as a prospective fashion designer in the modern day who starts taking nightly trips back into the ‘60s through Anya Taylor-Joy’s Sandie. These two are what the rest of the production revolves round, and they are absolutely terrific. McKenzie as a Cornish country girl trying to make it in the big city took a little bit of time to get used to, but not only does she work well with the accent, she’s even better as the main reactor for all the psychedelic calamity going on around her. Taylor-Joy, on the other hand, embodies ‘60s chic and energy to the same extent, if not exceeding, that of Margot Robbie in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I know the meme of how wanting to see her whenever you look in a mirror isn’t exactly unique to Ellie here, but she is damn effective as both a literal and figurative entry point for the film’s head-first dive into the era.
From there, Wright applies a lot of the tricks he cultivated from Baby Driver concerning editing and soundtrack to generate some real tinglers once the madness really starts to kick in. Editor Paul Machliss works like a dream from end to end, both with the initial euphoria of Ellie’s visions and the eventual turn into dissociative nightmares, aided greatly by Chung Chung-hoon’s fluid camera work and electrifying use of colour. But the real trick comes from Steven Price on the soundtrack, who manages to mix and match his original compositions with the plentiful ‘60s golden oldies tracks on offer, and create this underlying effect of suspense and dread hidden just underneath all this recognisable pop. Which is the perfect match for what the story is really going for.
In keeping with Wright’s seeming inability to make a film about a singular thing, there’s a lot going on here to do with mental health, the mistreatment of female entertainers and sex workers, some supernatural touches, and of course the history of the titular area of London’s West End. But the main thing being discussed here, which is actually quite a brave turn for a filmmaker with Wright’s background, is nostalgia. The film, its protagonist, and indeed its director, are all enamoured with the 1960s. The music, the fashion, the drinks, the movies, even some of the actors like former sex symbol Diana Rigg as Ellie’s landlord; it’s revivalism like Wright and quite a few other fanboy filmmakers love indulging in.
But where things get interesting is how it actively checks itself, in a number of facets, in regards to where that sense of nostalgia is coming from. It’s easy to listen to a lot of old records, see a few older movies, and think that you have a decent idea of what that moment in history was like. This is something exacerbated in the Internet age, where access to older media is easier than ever, meaning that we have a generation viewing a history with rose-tinted glasses that they weren’t even around to recollect. r/LeWrongGeneration, essentially.
Not that there’s anything wrong with reflecting on different times. History deserves to be remembered, and if there’s anything I’ve learnt over the past two years in isolation, it’s that there will always be value in thinking back to a time that isn’t the crushing tedium of the now. But when we only focus on the pop culture that has persisted to the present day, removed from context and the why and how of its creation, we end up doing a disservice to that very era. It stops being fascination or even adoration, and becomes something much darker. If you want to really understand a moment in history, you have to take in all of it, not just the parts you already like. And even though what you find lurking behind all of that bright and colourful memory candy likely won’t be as fun as you want it to be, to try and hide away from it will only make things worse.
In very sharp contrast to something like Once Upon A
Time In Hollywood, where the adoration of that era in pop culture was so
ingrained, it actively rewrote history just so the golden years would never
end, Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns take a more mature perspective
on that same idea. There is no lesser amount of hat-tipping to the culture of
London in the ‘60s, but it’s treated in a more holistic way, where the entirety
of it has to be acknowledged and recognised before we can start talking about
the “good old days”. Like I got into briefly with Synchronic, “good old days”
can mean one of any number of different things, depending on who you ask, and quite a lot of it involves conveniently leaving out the murkier elements of that history.
While I freely admit that the film does fumble slightly with sticking the landing on that bigger message, that only prevents me from liking this even more than I already do, rather than being so wrong as to sabotage everything that came before it. This is still a very well-made, very stylish, very gripping-like-few-productions-have-managed-this-year kind of film that shows Edgar Wright stepping into new territory as a filmmaker and, far as I’m concerned, reaping the artistic rewards for doing so. Truth be told, I think I like this even more than Baby Driver, and that was a pretty high bar for this film to clear.
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