Last Night in Soho (2021)


Multiple Mirror Effects in Movies
Last Night in Soho (2021)
Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.

This is a psychological horror film about Eloise (Thomasin Mckenzie), a young woman is obsessed with the fashion and music of 1960s London, but once she magically travels there, she finds that her dreams of the era turn into nightmares. The film is full of scenes with mirrors, including a nightclub stairway with an infinite mirror effect.




Eloise moves to the city to go to college and rents a flat in Soho from an old woman who experienced the '60s there first hand. Eloise goes outside one night and all of a sudden she finds herself in brightly-colored 1960s "Swinging London." (The time traveling is never explained.) Inside a nightclub called Café de Paris, she descends a staircase with mirrors on each side that reflect her drab clothing in an infinite mirror effect. But when she gets into the club, instead of seeing herself reflected back in a mirror, she sees a glamorous woman named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) in a bright pink dress. It's the horror movie trope of mirrors not reflecting reality. Every time we see Eloise next to a mirror, we see a reflection of Sandie. And when Sandie walks down the mirrored stairs, instead of multiple reflections of her, we see reflections of Eloise. Eloise changes her appearance to be more like Sandie, but then the nightmares begin. The mirror scenes in the movie are not all made with mirrors. Some are special effects made with green screens, sometimes combining the effects with real mirrors, some use identical twin actors, or two actors making identical choreographed movements. Movies Insider has a good YouTube video that explains how some of the mirror shots in the film were made, including the stairway mirrors scene which was made by combining films of each actress on the stairs. Director Edgar Wright also talks about some of the mirror scenes in a YouTube video that also shows how they filmed the amazing dance sequence where we see a man dancing with one woman, then the other in a continuous shot. The Café de Paris multiple mirrors stairs shots happen at about 25:00 and again at 31:10.