MovieChat Forums > Last Night in Soho (2021) Discussion > "They deserved it." - "I know" - huh?

"They deserved it." - "I know" - huh?


***spoilers****

Enjoyed the movie, but one exchange at the end bugged me a bit.

Towards the end of the movie when all has been revealed, old lady Sandie/Ms. Collins says (speaking of all the men she killed and hid in walls of her house) "they deserved it" and Eloise replies "I know". Huh? The men were just johns. The only one we saw being abusive to young Sandie was her pimp. Murdering him I can understand, but not the others.

I don't see how you can justify all those murders. Things didn't go the way Sandie imagined her life to be, but she had the opportunity to get out of that and didn't. And then after killing her pimp she just continues getting clients to kill? She's a sociopath. Hard to feel much sympathy, and the main character agreeing that the men deserved that was annoying.

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I agree that it was...different. I would like to think that it was more about, after having walked in her shoes, the young girl being sympathetic to her frame of mind...to her plight.
Because the film didn't portray the ghosts as being evil after all, they were just looking for help in...well, now that I think about it, either being released from their prison or in seeking justice for their killer. At least at the end there. Know what I mean?

If the movie was trying to justify the idea that Johns are worthy of death, I don't think they'd have allowed the viewer to view their ghosts in any kind of sympathetic light.

So it leads me to think that maybe she said "I know" as a matter of empathy...of seeing how Sandy (remembered a name!!) had been broken by all of it. Sandy didn't need to justify her actions to little whatsername because little whatsername had lived it...had first-person experience of how the unfolding of events had broken her. That's my own justification for it, anyway.

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I agree that it was...different. I would like to think that it was more about, after having walked in her shoes, the young girl being sympathetic to her frame of mind...to her plight.


This.

And let's not forget. Ellie doesn't have visions of what happens to Sandie. Ellie basically gets to feel what happens to Sandie. Her sense of reality and resultant emotional state was fucked up. That's why her grandma was so worried about her, and it's probably why her mom died...

Losing their shit over memories that aren't even theirs.

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Yep, I laughed out loud for that line.

But you have to remember the protagonist is an idiot. She believe the old man is a murder, but doesn't bother to ask anyone in the bar "what is his name?"

She is so dumb, go to police without ask the name first. And the Taxi driver is an idiot too: crash someone in middle of road. The old lady is an idiot, in the split second, she suddenly find her conscience for what? A slap on her face?

And the house is magical, ton of dead bodies can hide under wooden wall without the smell.

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"And the house is magical, ton of dead bodies can hide under wooden wall without the smell."

When Ms. Collins is first showing the room to Eloise, she talks about how in the summer the smell of the old house comes up out of the wood. There was also the mention of being next to the French restaurant and constant smell of garlic. I guess that was some attempt by the writer to explain why the bodies aren't detected, but it doesn't really sound plausible. ALL those bodies would make quite a stink, and surely over the years some tenant would have reported something and a nosy cop would have looked into it. A lot of dead "johns" in one area means likely a lot of widows and families with daddy suddenly gone, and surely some of those people would have made some noise.

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I know they foreshow the problem: summer smell, restaurant. But the explanations are laughable bad, dead body is incredible intense bad smell. Mythbusters tried to bury a pig (the most similar animal to human body) under concrete. Concrete! Not wood! Just one body! But the smell just keep coming up.

What a laughable bad movie, and the plot is steal from Crimson Peak: A girl can see ghost. She believe ghosts are trying to kill her. In the end she find out ghosts are trying to warn her a woman murder.

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60 year old bodies don't smell any more.

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Oh right, I didn't even think of that attempt at an explanation. But also, how did she keep getting customers?

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I totally agree about the idiot protagonist. Don't know, I may have fallen in sleep briefly, but I was pretty sure the fact that he is the cop was the mainline of the story. I was surprised that she was surprised about who he is.

Probably she was meant to be a dumb village girl. Otherwise we have to assume that people who made the movie are incompetent.

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It's the feminism. It's always men's fault even if it's woman's fault.

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I'm not bothered by its politics and I enjoy girl-power movies (like Jack Hill's movies and such), although I prefer them not to shove it in our faces. Anyway, I'm mostly bothered by its stupidity. But in a sense you are right - a tiny girl murdering a dozen men and disposing of their bodies, going for decades undetected by other tenants, witnesses and such requires too much suspension of disbelief. I mean, at least somebody should have smelled the rot, right?. So maybe they were preoccupied pushing their agenda, no matter the stupidity and shallowness required.

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What other tenants? She just rented out the upstairs.

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I don't remember, but probably I meant other inhabitants of the room. The whole house will smell horrible anyway.

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He wasn't the only one. We saw all kinds of hints (or I did) that the other guys began to drug her and take advantage each time they came back, 'til she could no longer stand it. The fact that they are being tormented also hints at that.

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I watched this again last night and didn't see that at all. If they are drugging her, how is she able to kill them? What specifically are you taking as evidence the "johns" abused her in any way, unless you're considering hiring a prostitute at all is inherently abuse? The only person we saw do anything to her was the pimp Jack, whom she killed.

When she relates the story to Eloise, she says "I liked it". meaning she liked the feeling of killing. Alexandra/Sandie is a sociopath mass murderer. I still think Eloise is ridiculously empathetic towards Sandy with her "I know" in response to Sandie saying "they deserved it". She was already free of her pimp and then continued to work as a prostitute just to kill. We know she could have gotten out of the lifestyle, as she eventually did. There was the cop who wanted to help her. And as she demonstrated the ability to disappear/change her identity and live another 50 years undetected, she certainly was capable of getting out of prostitution at any point. I'll buy maybe she had to kill Jack to do so, but after that? She was just a murderer.

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I don’t think she was getting new clients and continuing work as a prostitute other than using it to get her former clients back to the house to murder them. She killed the men whom she was forced or coerced into having sex with while caught in the world of her pimp. She didn’t then carry on with new men.

The Christie murders some 20 years before show that in a post war London house you can hide bodies for ages. The smell goes away after a while but the key factor is how cold these houses were. It’s difficult to imagine now in our modern age, but prior to the 80’s very few houses like that had central heating, or even hot water. They are dark, cold houses. Both my mother and mother in law tell stories of waking up in winter to ice on the inside of windows, frozen condensation. That’s why everyone wore thick clothes and thick bed covers.
The only heat was coal fires in the front room.

The confusion I found was whether I was supposed to feel sorry for these men, trapped in some sort of limbo. One could argue they were just men partaking in the world’s oldest profession or that they were essentially rapists who knew exactly what they were doing. Presumably adulterers too.

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Very unusual movie. Very well done. Sandie had oodles of looks, talent, and provocativeness, and was easily manipulated into becoming a prostitute. But while Jack had it coming, the other murdered "Johns" probably didn't... And clearly, she grew to like murdering those whom she thought deserved it.

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Cold in the summer?

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Depends when in the year they were killed, but even in summer, in the dark under some floorboards, temp in 1960s London would not be above 20Deg C I reckon.

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Sure, but that's not cold enough to prevent rot and putrefaction.

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As Don Corleone said to Amerigo Bonasera in “The Godfather” when Amerigo asked Don Vito to kill the men who beat his daughter til one inch of her life. He was demanding “justice” but Vito would have none of it. “That’s not justice, your daughter still lives”

Those men Sandie murdered never hurt her or of course killed her, so her killing them wasn’t justice in the least. She was never beat, maimed, disfigured or otherwise hurt & there’s no indication none of them bothered her afterwards so it’s hard to sympathize much for her.

Only that wing nut Eloise did because she idolized her, but she was wrong. She too could’ve used this logic but she wouldn’t.

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Yeah, it was definitely a strange moment. I was asking myself if the film was seriously expecting to audience to agree with this sentiment. Killing Jack was definitely justified but when she decided to become a bloodthirsty, serial killer when she could have walked away.

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It is the current feminist attitude: all Johns are seen as monsters.

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