‘Last Night in Soho’: The movie Bong Joon-ho saw as the beginning of a new chapter for Edgar Wright

Posted On September 16, 2025September 16, 2025

If you haven’t seen Edgar Wright’s 2021 horror-cum-thriller-cum-time travel movie Last Night in Soho because you were too worried about catching Covid-19 at the time, then I highly recommend you give it a go now.

For one thing, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho is a big fan, and, knowing a thing or two about films, we can take his word for it. For another, it has a fantastic twist at the end, and movies with twists are brilliant.

A psychological mystery that switches between present day and the swinging sixties of bohemian London, it features two superb central performances from Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, the story unfolding minute by minute in an immersive world that gets darker at every turn. 

With a soundtrack packed with string-soaked 1960s tunes you’ll want to seek out immediately after the credits roll, the film was also lent genuine English heritage by the final performances of the likes of Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg before they passed away, and the world of seedy nightclubs and dank bedsits is perfectly realised by Wright.

The director was coming off the success of the top-notch heist film Baby Driver, when he decided he wanted a tonal shift from it and his brilliant Cornetto trilogy that preceded it. Wanting to pen something of a love letter to Soho, having lived there for 20 years, he was influenced by the likes of horror classics Don’t Look Now and the cult Roman Polanski gem Repulsion, which is set in South Kensington in the 1960s and similarly tracks a young woman’s descent into madness.

Bong is no stranger to thematically dark movies: the acclaimed Parasite was a journey into how people can go from the everyday to the unhinged and obsessive via a critique of class and social capital. He interviewed Wright at the time of Last Night in Soho’s release and acknowledged that while he has watched all of his films, a common thread of his stories being about “innocent and sometimes nerdy characters getting trapped in difficult and strange situations and getting through them, overcoming them” is very evident. However, his new offering was a new notch in Wright’s filmmaking, which Bong was quick to point out.

“But with this film, I felt like something was different,” Bong asserted. “I felt like you were really heading straight into this fiery pit of tragedy—a new element to your filmography, the beginning of a new chapter for you. It made me look forward to your future films because it made me realise you will just continue on this cinematic journey, constantly reinventing your stories”.

In the end, the movie didn’t set the world alight at the box office, perhaps suffering from being a mixed-genre effort or bad timing carried over from 2020, but has earned its place in the cult corner with fans of the ‘60s and dark thrillers in general.

Wright is not what anyone would call prolific, instead picking and choosing his projects carefully, only directing two films in the last eight years. But he has returned to helm the reboot of The Running Man, starring flavour of the month hunk Glen Powell, the big money remake of the classic 1987 sci-fi smash headed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Originally a short story penned by Stephen King under a pseudonym, the movie, released in November, nicely dovetails with the release of another King adaptation, The Long Walk, this month.

As for Bong, he wrote and directed the Robert Pattinson space adventure Mickey 17 this year and is believed to be working on his first animated film on the animosity between creatures of the deep sea and humans.

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