Last Night in Soho

    Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie in “Last Night in Soho.” FOCUS FEATURES LLC photo by Parisa Taghizadeh via IMDB

If there's no TV show, no ceremony and no Ricky Gervais to insult everybody, is it still the Golden Globes?

That was the question this week – sort of an update on the old tree falling in the forest riddle. But the Hollywood Foreign Press Association went ahead and bestowed the awards anyway, announcing the winners on social media last Sunday. My choices coincided with the Globes voters in most of the major categories: Best Actor: Will Smith in “King Richard”; Best Actress: Nicole Kidman in “Being the Ricardos”; Best Director: Jane Campion for “The Power of the Dog,” which also nabbed the Best Picture prize.

I had submitted my votes  to the Hawaii Film Critics Society before the Globes were announced. The HFCS will announce its own movie award winners on Friday. We had to make new choices a couple of days later after many of the races had resulted in ties. (That's what happens when your voting members barely outnumber the nominees.) Many of my favorites had been eliminated after that first ballot, replaced by choices I would never have made.

Case in point, “Last Night in Soho,” Edgar Wright's stylish thriller about Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), an English girl from the country who goes to London to study fashion design but get rerouted into a time warp rabbit hole along the way. 

Ellie was brought up by her grandmother after her real mother committed suicide. Whatever psychological scars this left have mostly translated themselves into an obsession with all things '60s for the young woman, manifested in her Carnaby Street fashion sense and her music collection that's heavy on Petulia Clark and Dusty Springfield.

I say mostly, because Ellie still sees her mother occasionally, sometimes over her shoulder in the mirror.

The visions go into high gear once the lovely but naive lass arrives in London, and starts having deja-vus wherever she looks. Before she knows it, she's gone back in time to that swinging London of her fantasies, complete with a dazzling blond goddess at the center of it all.

The goddess's name is Sandy. In her slinky pink dress, she is sensual beyond belief, and that's before she even shows her moves on the dance floor or does her sultry rendition of “Downtown.” Sandy is played by Anya Taylor-Joy – yes, “The Queen's Gambit” herself – which may be why Eloise, and everyone else onscreen, and in the audience, can't take our eyes off her.

Who is she? Ellie's mother? Her alter-ego? Someone who's trying to tell her something? Or just evidence that poor Ellie is losing her mind?

Through some nifty cinematic tricks, writer-director Wright starts making Ellie and Sandy reflections of each other in a disco mirror, or blending them, or losing track of which is which. This doesn't help Eloise's precarious grip on reality as she keeps pursuing her design school career by day, but keeps descending deeper into London's seedy sides after hours. A silver-haired barfly (Terence Stamp) would be enough to creep anyone out, much less a simple girl from the country.

The storyline veers from psychological drama to a more graphic horror show after Eloise moves out of the dorms and into a red-light apartment. Literally – there's a red neon light for a downstairs restaurant right outside her window. Her landlady is played by the late Diana Rigg, reminding some of us of the time in our memories when Dame Diana would be the one playing the Sandy role.

New Zealand's McKenzie, fresh from a more wholesome role in 2019's quirky “Jojo Rabbit,” is alternately vulnerable and alluring as the latter-day Alice trapped in a poor excuse for Wonderland. But for all of the film's sensually cinematic style points and derivative references to an endless array of movie classics, this was one of those mysteries where my biggest question was constantly wondering what the hell was going on.

As someone who actually remembers when Petulia Clark and Dusty Springfield were the new girls on the charts, “Last Night in Soho” was less a flash from the past than a visit to a present world I barely recognize.

But watch for it on the Hawaii Film Critics Society awards list. We're there on the Internet Movie Database, right under the Golden Globes.