Director: Edgar Wright
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terrence Stamp
Have I Seen it Before: Never, but man, how I’ve wanted to. The film had completely flown under my radar until seeing a trailer for it tied to No Time To Die (2021). The marketing was spot on. Beside both films sharing an essential Britishness, there are plenty of subtle Bond nods in the film, including setting the film precisely in time with a massive Thunderball (1965) poster greeting us in the past, and characters reflexively ordering Vespers.
Did I Like It: In my review of The Night House (2021), I remarked that it was possible that the fusion of ghost stories and Hitchcockian thrillers was intuitively obvious, but ultimately disappointing.
I spoke too soon. Wright has yet to make a bad movie, and this is a perfect fusion of style and suspense. That alone would merely meet expectations, but the man who has made his bones making confections of almost pure homage in the TV series Spaced and his collaborations with Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World’s End (2013)) has moved on from purely making a reference to something else, but instead charting his own course.
This type of film isn’t going to be at all accepted by the audience of the visual world is not completely immaculate (and other examples of the genre can at least lay claim to that much), but here the true legacy of Hitchcock is maintained and the plot is completely immaculate. I may have had a sense that Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg, who died shortly after production and ended her stellar career on a high note) knew more about what was happening to Ellie (McKenzie, also perfectly cast) and so the big twist may not have hit as hard as it had been intended, but the trip trough it was so delightful, I couldn’t possibly care. After all, who younger than the age of 60 saw Psycho (1960) for the first time and didn’t know what was coming in the fruit cellar?
Wright here has pulled over a supreme trick, and one for which I cannot readily award another filmmaker. He has grown up beyond the types of films which made him famous (films which I enjoyed immensely) and leaves me in equal measures not mourning the fact that he might not make those types of films ever again, and supremely excited for what he might have up his sleeve next.