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Last Night in Soho’s controversial conclusion is carried by a dramatic final performance by the late actor Diana Rigg.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Last Night in Soho, now in theaters.
When Last Night in Soho first premiered at the Venice Film Festival, director Edgar Wright made a plea to critics and festivalgoers not to spoil the thriller’s third act twists before its theatrical release. The film’s second trailer arguably spoiled too much of the second act, revealing the bloody murder scene at the center of the movie, but even that trailer is cleverly misleading; anyone who thought they could predict the ending of the movie based on that trailer has most likely been proven wrong. Last Night in Soho‘s controversial conclusion rests on a complete reversal of the film’s mystery and a dramatic final performance by the late Diana Rigg.
Last Night in Soho is dedicated to Rigg, who played Emma Peel in the ’60s spy series The Avengers and Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. At first, Rigg’s character in the film simply goes by “Ms. Collins.” Ms. Collins is the landlady of the building that the protagonist Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) rents to get away from the bullies in her college dorm. Ellie’s vivid dreams of time-traveling to 1964 show that a violent, seemingly deadly altercation between the showgirl Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her pimp Jack (Matt Smith) happened in her room. Now haunted by Sandie’s ghost in her waking hours, Eloise suspects a creepy old man following her (Terence Stamp) to be Jack and tries to bring him to justice.
However, it turns out there are two major cases of mistaken identity at play here. The old man turns out not to be Jack, but rather just a retired cop who tried to get Sandie out of sex work. Jack is actually dead — and Sandie killed him. Sandie turned the tables on the murder scene Ellie thought she saw and would go on to kill all of her abusers, who’d become the other ghosts haunting Ellie. Where is Sandie in the present day? She’s Ms. Collins.
The aspect of this ending that is the most confusing is why Eloise was seeing Sandie’s ghost if Sandie was alive. The elder Sandie/Ms. Collins explains that a part of herself did “die,” in a sense, the night she became a murderer. In the Q&A following Last Night in Soho‘s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, director Edgar Wright and co-writer Kristy Wilson-Cairns explained in further detail that they don’t envision ghosts as being the literal souls of the dead but rather as psychic energy left over from a particularly traumatic time and place. This logic manages to make Eloise’s ability to see ghosts and time-travel essentially one-and-the-same, both results of being ridiculously in-tune with the energy of the past.
Sandie’s trauma has led her to be so distrusting of men that she ends up almost killing Eloise’s love interest John (Michael Ajao). Ellie defends John, and the ghosts of Sandie’s abusers try to take advantage of this situation by trying to convince Ellie to kill Sandie herself, but Ellie holds back, sympathetic to why Sandie ended up the way she did. The old lady ultimately causes her own demise, dying in the flames of the building part of herself already died in long ago. It’s a juicy and memorable final role for the great Diana Rigg to go out on.
See Diana Rigg’s final performance in Last Night in Soho, now playing in theaters.
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