"You know how to dance. You know why you're here": Gender and Horror in Last Night In Soho

SPOLIERS, SPOLIERS, SPOLIERS

...the way out of trauma, and out of pain, suffering and fear is not through more pain, or damnation, or criticism of the people who have been hurt but to forgive, to be kind, to work together to prevent the pain from happening again, and again, and again.

Last Night in Soho (2021) is a fantastic treatise on the female experience and a modern 'Female Gothic' that excellently blends culture, gender, and music into its own, very Edgar Wright, brand of British horror. This post will explore how the film plays about with the motifs of sexualisation and gender to construct its horror, in ways very akin to Ellen Moers’s ‘The Female Gothic’ and Laura Mulvey’s ‘The Male Gaze.’ I believe that Soho functions as an attempt to reach back into the history of female suffering and that it constitutes a desire to help, console, and heal the women of history who have been hurt. As much as it is horrific, the film is also surprisingly sweet and ends with a wonderful sense of hope about the future, and an escape from fear, trauma, and horror.

Last Night in Soho (2021) Poster, Focus Features / Universal Pictures [online image] Copywright belongs to image owners.

Written by Edgar Wright (Spaced 1999-2001, Shaun of the Dead 2004, Baby Driver 2017) and Krysty Wilson Cairns (Penny Dreadful 2014-2016, 1917 2019), and directed by Wright, Last Night in Soho follows a young and idealistic fashion student Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) who lives with her grandmother, is obsessed with 1960s culture, and has an ability to see ghosts, primarily of her dead mother, and who is living in London for the first time. Hating her student halls, Ellie finds an advert for a cheap bedsit and goes to check it out. The landlady Ms Collins (Diana Rigg) is nice enough and the room is cheap, so Ellie moves in.

John Phillips, BFI, 'Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns (2021), Copywright belongs to image owners.

When she sleeps in the flat, Ellie has dreams about a young woman in the 60s called Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), whose birth name is Alexandra, and begins to experience moments from her life. Sandie is similarly idealistic and desires success in London’s showbiz world and hooks up with an agent called Jack (Matt Smith) to help her do it. Enamoured by Sandie and her style and confidence, Ellie changes her hair and dress sense to be like her and makes clothing about her style and shuns other aspects of her life. She also gets a job in a pub to pay for this new lavish lifestyle. Still, in dreams, Ellie experiences the life of Sandie entering the entertainment industry. Much to both women’s dismay, Sandie is an erotic dancer at a small club called the Rialto. Her idealism is shattered, and with nowhere else to go Sandie then falls into the world of London sex work, with Jack her abusive and controlling pimp. Shaken by these things, Ellie then experiences things from the dream world in reality, she sees the ghostly shapes of faceless men, Sandie’s patrons, in her flat and in the streets of London, and even when she tries to ignore Sandie she can still see her around the city.

To escape from these things, Ellie goes out with friends and begins to tentatively explore a relationship with John (Michael Ajao), a fellow fashion student and one of the few people to be nice to Ellie. When she brings John back to her flat, Ellie witnesses a vision of Sandie’s murder at the hands of Jack. Being traumatised by this, Ellie then begins to dedicate all of her time to finding out what happened to Sandie. She thinks she knows the modern-day, older Jack (Terence Stamp) drinking in the pub she works at and tries to go to the police for help, but they obviously don’t believe her. She also investigates missing person reports from the 60s, with John’s help.

Greg Williams, Set Photos of Last Night in Soho, Copywright belongs to Greg Williams

After multiple visions and terrifying flashbacks into Sandie’s life, Ellie finally confronts the older Jack who is then run over by a taxi and is revealed to not be Jack but a retired police officer called Lyndsey. Distraught and confused Ellie tries to make it home back to her grandmother and finds John who helps her. Going back to the flat to get her things and her deposit, Ellie sits down with her landlord. Noticing little objects in the room that she recognises, and then a letter addressed to Alexandra Collins on her table, Ellie realises that her landlady is Sandie, who never died at all. It is revealed that Sandie killed Jack when he attacked her and because of all the suffering and injustice she experienced at the hands of men she began luring and killing men in her flat, the flat that she now rents to Ellie. (If you want my opinion on this twist, click here).

Releasing that Ellie has told the police and knows too much, Alexandra poisons her, but Ellie then tries to escape but knocks over a cigarette into a box of records which starts a fire. John goes in looking for Ellie but is stabbed by Alexandra, now with the flames rising in the house Alexandra goes after Ellie with a knife and both end up in the top room. All the ghosts of the men killed come out of the walls and beg Ellie to kill Alexandra to revenge them but Ellie refuses. Upon seeing the ghosts of the men she killed Alexandra finds no will left to live anymore and lets the flames of her house consume her. Ellie tries to save her but she cannot convince her.

Ellie and John survive the ordeal, and Ellie succeeds in her degree. John and her grandmother are proud of her, and so is her mother, who appears as a ghostly shade in a mirror. In the final moment, Sandie's image appears in the mirror but Ellie, a new Ellie now more confident, moves her aside.

This little summary is not meant to detail or breakdown every important moment in the film, of which there are many, nor is it an adequate retelling of its fantastic story. It is simply a reminder of Soho’s plot and core themes. There are so many aspects of Soho that play integral roles in the film, any one of which could be the basis for an entire series of posts: there’s the Sarah Water’s esque depiction of London as a dangerous, multilayered and ghostly space, the preoccupation with time and era, as well as ageing, the use of music and costume, mental health issues, the impact of grief, the experience of student life, and, obviously, horror and fear.

Concerning gender however, the film has a disturbing uncurrent of gendered anxiety, primarily from women fearing or having to deal with abuse, sexualisation and violence from men. For this reason, I think that the most fortuitous way of breaking down the film’s depiction and exploration of gender is by analysing it through two core theoretical standpoints, of which I believe the film is certainly aware. These theories are Laura Mulvey’s ‘The Male Gaze’ and Ellen Moers’s ‘the Female Gothic.’ Below is a look at these theories necessary for the breakdown of Soho, but if you want to skip it click here).

‘The Male Gaze’, originally outlined by Laura Mulvey in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), is a theoretical term used to describe how male viewers interact with images of women, and by extension actual women. Mulvey uses Freudian thinking of how men are confronted with sexual anxieties and uncanny fears of castration by seeing women’s lack of male genitalia and argues that ‘woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other.’[1]

But Mulvey builds on Freud's idea by exploring how men then navigate around this reminder of castration anxiety through voyeuristic and fetishising methods. Mulvey defines voyeurism as the ‘preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma [of castration]’ to investigate the naked female body and ‘demystify her’ [Mulvey, 811], and fetishisation as the act of turning the object of fear into an object of pleasure so that it becomes ‘reassuring rather than dangerous’ [Mulvey, 811]. Voyeurism and fetishisation crucially displace the castration fear and anxiety, while also removing female sexual power, allowing men to regain control over anxiety and fear.

However, this process serves another function for men. Mulvey uses Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror as a tool for constructing the ego to illustrate how men use women through gazing to construct their own identities [Mulvey, 807]. Mulvey states that 'The Male Gaze' demands the ‘identification of the ego with the object [woman] on-screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like’ [Mulvey, 808]. As women signify male sexual powerlessness by castration, they simultaneously represent male sexual power by a voyeuristic and fetishising view of them. Therefore, gazing constructs the male ego and sense of self as sexually powerful and confident on the back of viewing women as sexually powerless.

Vertigo is one of the classic movies that Mulvey deconstructs with the theory. Vertigo Lobby card for Vertigo (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures, Copyright Belongs to the Image Owners.

Applying her thinking to the classic era of cinema, Mulvey explores how film works in tandem with 'The Male Gaze.' She argues that cinema reinforces the construction of the male ego by creating male characters who are the prime example of the masculinity that 'The Male Gaze' creates: ‘a male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego’ [Mulvey, 810]. Mulvey also notes how the overall process of 'The Male Gaze' creates an objectifying and sexualising environment for women, both on-screen and off, which creates an ‘active/male and passive/female’ gendered dichotomy [Mulvey, 804]. Finally, Mulvey sees the process of 'The Male Gaze' as ultimately futile, stating how the act of fetishization, in fact, freezes men in gazing forever; she argues that men must continually look and continually fetishize to displace the castration fear but in doing so are prevented ‘from achieving any distance from the image in front of him’ [Mulvey 816].

''The Male Gaze' is ultimately about male construction of ego and power, which has a secondary effect of sexualising women, which then bleeds into media and culture and constitutes a prime example of 'The Male Gaze's' presence in modern society.

Another theory that is of great use here, although it has its problems, is 'The Female Gothic'. 'The Female Gothic' is a term used to refer to a genre of female-centric horror. Coined by Ellen Moers in her seminal collection Literary Women (1976), 'The Female Gothic' is defined as ‘the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic’ that has a ‘long and complex tradition […] where woman is examined with a woman’s eye, woman as girl, as sister, as mother, as self.’[2] That first definition is very broad and unspecific but the second defines Moers's belief that women have shared experiences that form collective anxiety which can manifest itself in 'The Female Gothic' texts.

Moers goes on to define these specific female anxieties and fears. The first being the characteristics of ‘guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences’ [Moers, 83]. 'The Female Gothic' is thus grappling with issues and anxieties around female bodily experience and uses motifs of that experience to construct its gothic horror, the prime example of which, one that Moers herself uses, is Frankenstein, which according to Moers is a ‘birth myth’ [Moers, 91], a story that isolates specific fears of childbirth and mothering to generate gothic fear. From this fear, 'The Female Gothic' goes into a much broader theme of female sexuality but instead of using sexuality as an avenue of sexual power, 'The Female Gothic' uses it to denote issues of female powerlessness through imagery of sexual pain, those surrounding menstruation and the loss of virginity.

Book Cover, Ellen Moers, ‘The Female Gothic’, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978), Copyright belongs to image owners.

The scope of 'The Female Gothic' is not solely limited to these, it is also focused on issues around the obsessions with female appearance. Moers states that ‘from infancy, indeed from the moment of birth, the looks of a girl are examined with ruthless scrutiny by all around her’ [Moers, 108]. Such ruthlessness informs the creation of ruthless horror centred around always being looked at, judged, and cajoled. Moers suggests that this fear has been manifested in women's gothic horror and that such horror becomes concerned with ‘the compulsion to visualize the self' [Moers, 107] and female feelings of ‘self-disgust […] self-hatred [and] self-destruction’ [Moers, 107] as a result; through motifs of ‘creatures with hideous deformities [and] freaks” [Moers, 108].

That forcefulness of making a woman appear in a certain way also contributes to another aspect of 'The Female Gothic' horror, that of entrapment. Many gothic texts have a female character usually locked away or trapped in a large house or castle, but in 'Female Gothic' horror the same character archetype is used but the space that that woman is trapped in becomes a symbol of the female body. Moers argues that women are forced into using their bodies for either childbirth or by creating certain appearances, which in essence traps them in their bodies, and this entrapment informs 'Female Gothic' tendencies to project fear and anxiety onto the body. The female body is already treated with self-disgust but is also treated as an object to be escaped from or trapped in, what Moers defined as a ‘living corpse’ [Moers, 110].

Interesting the note that here we have two critics who discuss very similar ideas. Mulvey notes how the male sense of self is created by an objectifying view of women while Moers states that female sense of self is created by the treatment of women as bodily objects, to be used, scrutinized and trapped in. It is not far to say that they function together, then, as compatible ideas, Mulvey exploring the creation of gendered definitions and appearances and Moers exploring the impact of them. This article will explore how these two ideas are even more compatible later on.

Both of these theories are coming from the Second Wave of feminist criticism, and like any theory, they are subject to criticism themselves. Since the use of Moers’s theory here is not alike in every way to what she herself laid out, these problems with 'The Female Gothic' should be addressed to allow a newer definition of the genre that is of better use to our purpose of exploring Last Night in Soho.

Ellen Ledoux examines 'The Female Gothic' and suggests that it ‘more accurately reflects the ideological goals of second wave feminist criticism than it represents the narratives of early women gothic writers.’[3] She also argues that the writing done through 'Female Gothic' thinking is focused solely on gendered and left-wing politics and ‘did not represent the ideological diversity of women writers’ who wrote about ‘conservative politics, engage[d] with issues outside of gender’ and addressed ‘the concerns of working-class women’ [Ledoux, 2].

It is true that what Ellen Moers defines as 'The Female Gothic' is solely based on gender and she does ignore other issues brought about by female texts. However, I would argue that 'The Female Gothic' does not have to address every aspect of female-authored horror. The appeal of the genre is its focus on that specific form of gendered and bodily terror and although the history of the criticism surrounding the genre has excluded other topics being discussed that does not mean that female experience, bodies, and sexuality has not become a massive factor in the construction of gothic horror.

Ledoux goes on to criticise 'The Female Gothic' further by suggesting that Moers’s simple definition, that female gothic texts are those written solely by women, is limiting. She states that there are ‘categorical problems inherent to a term that links a stable notion of gender to a notoriously slippery literary mode’ [Ledoux, 2] and that the gendered lines of the theory do not match up with the content of female gothic writing, neither its genre or readership. The idea that gothic texts written by women must involve fear and anxieties of childbirth and sexuality and that no male-authored gothic text can involve those ideas is something that I and Ledoux certainly disagree with. That idea excludes many texts and films from being considered 'Female Gothic', one of them being Last Night in Soho. The becomes more problematic when we consider how gender is not binary and an author may have a reproductive body but identify as male or vice versa; should their contributions to gothic horror around sexuality and the body be ignored? (An idea that becomes increasingly problematic when we consider how Moers defined transgender bodies as hermaphroditic and freakish.)

Although there are shared female experiences, to say that all women are the same or feel the same gets awfully too close to patriarchal and misogynist narratives that feminism is trying to destroy leave behind.

On the topic of the gendered problems with Moers’s 'Female Gothic', we should also point out that the theory assumes that there is a collective female experience, where ‘woman is examined as self’ [Moers, 109] which is problematic because it suggests that all-female experience is the same. Although there are shared female experiences, to say that all women are the same or feel the same gets awfully too close to patriarchal and misogynist narratives that feminism is trying to destroy leave behind.

Building off Ledoux we can get towards a form 'The Female Gothic' that can be applied to a wider range of texts and films. When not limited by the idea that 'The Female Gothic' is only found in female-authored prose, the scope of things applicable under the genre becomes a lot larger, with titles such as Alien (1979) Crimson Peak (2015), The Others (2001), The Witch (2015), and the Neon Demon (2017) and even in videos games like A Plague’s Tail (2019), Bloodborne (2015), Silent Hill (1999 - 2014) and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017), having female gothic elements and gendered anxieties at their hearts.

So, although Last Night in Soho is not solely female-authored that does not discredit its 'Female Gothic' status. Furthermore, Last Night in Soho, I believe, functions in a way that can be decoded and understood through 'The 'Female Gothic' and 'The Male Gaze' while also functioning as a prime example of how times and theories change with how it messes with and contorts these theories to create its horror.

I believe that it was important to outline the theories used here firstly as the ways in which they are applied to Soho are not as clear cut as simply quoting the theorist verbatim. So, thanks for sticking with me if you did.

It’s about healing those who have been hurt by fetishisation, voyeurism and objectification.

Last Night in Soho plays about with motifs of the sexualisation and consumption of the female body, through 'The Male Gaze', to construct its horror, which functions as a way to connect Ellie and Sandie together. The film then uses the connection made between the two women through 'Female Gothic' motifs as a mechanism to achieve its overall goal of reaching back into the history of female suffering and trying to save and console all the women who have suffered from sexualisation and sexual violence in the past. It’s about healing those who have been hurt by fetishisation, voyeurism and objectification.

Both Ellie and Sandie have separate yet similarly negative experiences of fetishisation from 'The Male Gaze'. Ellie, when in London, is accosted by a cab driver who assumes she is a ‘model’ and ‘has the legs for it.’ She immediately experiences fetishisation, where the cab driver attempts to enact his self-perceived sexual power over her to mediate his own anxiety. He waits outside a shop for her, like a predator trying to find prey. He even attempts to enact sexual power by fetishising all of the other women that Ellie will be staying with, at university halls, saying he’d be popping around regularly. In a similar way, Sandie, when arriving on the London showbiz scene, is accosted by a man in a club, who also fetishises her. Stating she’s a ‘whore’, an assumption gardened simply by his looking at her. Sandie is then trapped within a world of 'The Male Gaze' when she enters the performance world, in trying to fulfil her dreams of stardom she quickly becomes involved in a burlesque club, and eventually falls entirely into prostitution.

Interestingly, the film plays about with 'The Male Gaze' to double down on the horror of both women’s situations. Mulvey points out that in classic cinema men on screen are valorised and respected by the men watching them, and they function as a concrete basis for the male ego to build off of. She states:

‘[A]s the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincide with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are this not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror’ [Mulvey 810].

The film thus flips the theories, using its own mechanisms of constructing male egos and power to present male looking as destructive and frighting, from the perspective of a woman.

The visions into the past of the 1960s function, effectively, as viewing a movie from the classic era of film. So, we might expect that a male viewer of Sandie’s past would construct their sense of self through the character of Jack, however, it is Ellie who is viewing this past. Therefore, Jack, and the other men that come to her as faceless ghosts, become the opposite of ego, they represent disgust, fear, and anxiety in the male gender, the very thing that 'The Male Gaze' attempts to eliminate, and what 'The Female Gothic' states only women experience. The film thus flips the theories, using its own mechanisms of constructing male egos and power to present male looking as destructive and frighting, from the perspective of a woman.

Furthermore, the female anxiety surrounding male gazing is manifested in a Female Gothic way, through its core gothic object, the ghost. The act of looking constitutes sexualisation and is the core source of anxiety and fear for both Ellie and Sandie and is manifested as faceless, voiceless ghosts, who can only look. Creatures who exist entirely to sexualise by their mere presence. The film takes an aspect of womanly existence and transports it into the gothic mode, just like Carol Davison states: the Female Gothic ‘deploys the supernatural for political ends.’ [4].

Ellie becomes more of a confident and happier person from seeing Sandie as her reflection and so we can say that Ellie constructs her own sense of ego and self from viewing Sandie in the mirror/in a movie set in the past

But Soho goes even further with that deconstruction of 'The Male Gaze' by using its own processes to construct female ego and confidence. This is where the mirrors that Mulvey points out come in. The mirror is a form of generating ego as in infant which informs how the male ego is created from male characters on screen, a process reworked in Soho as Ellie, in her dreams of Sandie, sees Sandie through a mirror, as her reflection. Ellie becomes more of a confident and happier person from seeing Sandie as her reflection and so we can say that Ellie constructs her own sense of ego and self from viewing Sandie in the mirror/in a movie set in the past, even changing her appearance to be more like Sandie. This construction the female self from other women is like Moers exploration of 'The Female Gothic' compulsion to ‘visualize the self’ [Moers, 107]. Ellie seeing Sandie and then constructed her appearance and self on her is an attempt to visualize herself and become the version of herself she aspires to be.

The playing about with 'The Male Gaze' functions to connect Ellie and Sandie together through shared experience and reflections, but this is not the only way in which Soho connects Ellie and Sandie together. The two generate something like a familial connection. As Sandie is a basis to form Ellie's sense of self and her appearance, she uses Sandie as a motherly figure, Lindsay, the old cop, even thinks Sandie was Ellie’s mother. Their relationship mirrors that of the mother/child identity relationship, where the identity of the mother and her child merge together, as pointed out by Jacques Lacan (of which Mulvey bases part of her theory on), at least for Ellie.[5] Furthermore, Ellie using Sandie to construct ego has significance given how Ellie’s own mother died when she was young, making Sandie function as a sort of surrogate mother to Ellie, constituting the female gothic tradition of viewing woman ‘as mother’ [Moers, 110].

But furthermore, Sandie’s death functions as a repetition of the death of her own mother, Ellie is once again subjected to the feminine pain of losing a mother, which influences her obsession with finding Sandie’s killer, she’s effectively looking to revenge her own mother as much as Sandie

This idea of Sandie being mother and Ellie being daughter has massive connotations for the 'Female Gothic' aspects of the film. Elisabeth Bronfen has stated that ‘the aesthetic representation of death lets us repress our knowledge of the reality of death precisely because her death occurs at someone else’s body and as an image.’[6] Bronfen writes about viewing a dead body on screen or in art and although I agree with her, her interpretation cannot be correct for the instance where Ellie sees (what she thinks is) Sandie’s death. Because she sees the death through a mirror as if she was Sandie then her death is not that of another, it is Ellie’s death as much as it is Sandie’s. And thus, upon viewing the corpse of the base of her own sense of self, Ellie sees the corpse as a manifestation of herself and her ego, which reminds her of her own mortality. A reworking of Bronfen's idea allows for this interpretation. But furthermore, Sandie’s death functions as a repetition of the death of her own mother, Ellie is once again subjected to the feminine pain of losing a mother, which influences her obsession with finding Sandie’s killer, she’s effectively looking to revenge her own mother as much as Sandie.

Sticking with the theme of mothers the film generates another connection between Ellie and Sandie through both of them having birth names and preferred names, which brings up connotations of childbirth. Ellie’s birth name is Eloise, but she goes by Ellie. Perhaps this is because when her mother died that version of Ellie, the Eloise, similarly died with her, giving birth to Ellie. Similarly, Sandie, born Alexandria, experiences two births. Sandie dies when she is forced into sex work, herself even saying that she ‘died a thousand times’ leaving only Alexandria alive. She has a mirrored, compatible experience with Ellie then, wherein the firstborn, instead of the second-born, survives. Interestingly, the old police officer Lyndsey says that ‘if anyone killed Sandie it was Alex’ (Alexandria) and this is figurately true as when Sandie, the ‘daughter’ dies she is taken over by Alexandria, her ‘mother.’ The idealistic showgirl is killed by her mother, the vengeful murderess. Thus, both Ellie’s and Sandie’s lives are reflective of each other, having died once and being born twice each. This is a truly remarkable use of the 'Female Gothic' genre I have to say.

Soho excellently blends the Male Gaze into a horrific treatise on the female experience and does so by brilliantly remoulding and reassessing, even though metatextual ways, the conventions of 'The Male Gaze.'

These 'Female Gothic' connections exist within the narrative because of the presence of 'The Male Gaze.' Soho excellently blends the Male Gaze into a horrific treatise on the female experience and does so by brilliantly remoulding and reassessing, even though metatextual ways, the conventions of 'The Male Gaze.' One of the best ways the film presents this remoulding visually is the depiction of the male ghosts. They are faceless and grotesque beings who can only look, can only gaze, which makes them sources of anxiety for Ellie as they are men who can only fetishize her. A creature of such malignant, sexualised power would be terrifying to us all, I think. But the film develops this horrific 'Male Gaze' and flips it around to remove the power from the male ghosts and give it to Ellie. The ghosts are importantly eyeless, which in a Freudian sense suggests they have been castrated. Freud believed that ‘the fear of going blind [or eyeless] is often enough a substitute for the dread castration.’[7] (Sigmund Freud’s love of penises helps us out once again). Thus, these ghosts ultimately failed in their attempt to create ego to escape the fear of castration, they are frozen in the look as Mulvey pointed out. The sexualisation got them nowhere, and so they are frozen in such a position, as ghosts, forever. Their sexualisation of Sandie failed to create their sexual power and instead led them into death, murdered by a woman they were supposed to have sexual power over, effectively castrated. Soho certainly knows exactly what 'The Male Gaze' is doing and delves into it to annihilate the sources of power male viewers derive from it.

It reaches out and through the mirror, the screen, the past, its break that barrier to connect the seen and the unseen, the real and the fictional, fantasy and reality, the canny and the uncanny.

The act of witnessing Sandie and her struggles, and also Ellie depicting herself as Sandie, takes her out of the past, it makes her and her pain known, it makes the people that caused her pain known and cats a light on their unjust treatment of her. It reaches out and through the mirror, the screen, the past, its break that barrier to connect the seen and the unseen, the real and the fictional, fantasy and reality, the canny and the uncanny if you will.

But why? Why make Sandies’s experiences seen. Soho's process is not as simple as making her known, like putting her on a screen to be seen, it's more proactive than that. It constitutes an attempt to heal Sandie and all the women who had been hurt or even killed in the past. This consoling, supportive and healing process is seen multiple times in the film, the first when Ellie witnesses Sandie first falling into sex work, and she actively smashes a mirror/screen, transgressing the barrier between them, even transgressing time, simply to hug her. A simple yet massively important gesture that is indicative of Ellie’s need to save her mother but also her, and the film’s, desire to save Sandie, and those like her. An act that even echoes into the future as Ellie tries to solve the mystery of Sandie’s supposed death. It is true that Ellie is trying to save Sandie to save her mother and also her own sense of self, but that action nevertheless reverberates into a larger attempt to console Sandie and offer help, in any way, to her, her memory, and her experiences.

Ellie’s need to save Sandie and to try and heal her from the suffering she has experienced is seen in the last moments of the film. After the reveal that Sandie is a killer, Ellie is once again accosted by male ghosts who would have her kill Sandie, as these ghosts see Sandie as an object of fear and anxiety, shown by them cowering in fear upon her entrance to the upstairs room, and because of that, she needs to be destroyed. But Ellie resolutely denies this request, because she knows that in order to save the women who have been hurt in the past and to heal whatever is left of them after suffering, no matter what they have become, is not accomplished through punishment and even more pain. You cannot heal people and fix the system that made them into what they are by punishing them further, in that way you are just making the whole cycle of abuse, trauma and pain last longer. Ellie knows this, with her last act with Sandie not being damning her but trying to save her from the burning flames of what was once her life.

... in order to save the women who have been hurt in the past and to heal whatever is left of them after suffering, no matter what they have become, is not accomplished through punishment and even more pain. You cannot heal people and fix the system that made them into what they are by punishing them further, in that way you are just making the whole cycle of abuse, trauma and pain last longer.

Many people online have expressed contempt and irritation towards this twist, stating how it ruins the good work the film did in depicting the female experience. I would say to those people that they should think about the following questions. Do the actions of someone after their trauma, if considered morally bad, negate the fact they experienced trauma at all? If so, where do you draw the line, what actions are too morally corrupt, and what are acceptable? Does that mean trauma has to be earnt, that the people who experienced injustice have to act a certain way to make their experiences valid? Isn’t that just another form of repression and injustice? Ultimately, the twist of the film serves its aims of trying to heal hurt women no matter how much they have been hurt and what they have become because of their pain. It understands that the way foreword out of trauma, and out of pain, suffering and fear is not through more pain, or damnation, or criticism of the people who have been hurt but to forgive, to be kind, to work together to prevent the pain from happening again, and again, and again.

Last Night in Soho is a brilliant film. There's so much going in within it that more articles like this one are needed to understand its wonderful construction. It's a modern piece that not only brings up the critical theories of the past but serves as an example of how such theories can, and indeed need to, change and develop. Although its horror isn’t terrifying to the horror buff the horror functions as a necessity for the film’s narrative expression of female existence. I would hope, in fact, I very much believe, that Soho will be a favourite amongst the film and literature professors of the future. If I could, I would write all of those essays about this film but alas I can only do so much from one viewing, but with the on-demand release around the corner, you may be seeing more of Soho on this blog in the future.

Bibliography

[1] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), pp. 803 – 816, (p. 804)

[2] Ellen Moers, ‘The Female Gothic’, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1978) p. 90; p. 109.

[3] Ellen Ledoux, ‘Was There Ever a Female Gothic?’, Palgrave Communications, 3 (2017), 1 – 7 (p. 2).

[4] Carol Margaret Davison, ‘Haunted House/ Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper”’, Women’s Studies, 33 (2004), 47-75 (p. 48).

[5] Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’, Jacques Lacan: Ecrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, ed. by Heloise Fink and Russel Grigg (London: W.W Norton & Co, 2006), p. 79.

[6] Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘From Animate Body to Inanimate Text’, Over Her Dead Body (Manchester: Manchester University Press) p. x.

[7] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), pp. 592 - 614 (p.599).