LONDON RECALLING
WRIGHT’S FILMIC FLASHBACK TO A MURDER IN SWINGING 60S SOHO IS VISUALLY STUNNING BUT LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (18)
A SHRINKING violet with a penchant for Dusty Springfield gets a terrifying glimpse of the sordid desires of 1960s London in director Edgar Wright’s timetravelling horror thriller.
Painfully shy teenager Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) inherited her love of swinging 1960s fashion and vinyl from her mentally ill mother, who harboured dreams of designing couture in London before she took her own life.
Eloise’s parent also bequeathed her daughter another gift: psychic sensitivity to phantoms of the past.
The aspiring designer is accepted into London College of Fashion and bids farewell to her fretful grandmother Peggy (Rita Tushingham) in Redruth to travel to the bustling capital.
Eloise takes up lodgings in the musty Fitzrovia attic of Miss Collins (Diana Rigg) where the student experiences unsettling visions of aspiring singer Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) and menacing admirer Jack (Matt Smith), who meet in 1965
London in the glittering surroundings of the Cafe de Paris.
Timelines become dangerously blurred as Eloise inhabits Sandie’s body by night and dyes her hair blonde to take on the chanteuse’s striking appearance by day.
Structured as a murder mystery that repeatedly blurs present and past, Last Night In Soho conceals its ho-hum narrative behind layers of dazzling production and costume design and the luridly lit cinematography of Chung Chunghoon.
He works closely with Wright to construct intricately choreographed sequences festooned with mirrored reflections, which allows the lead actresses to seemingly inhabit the same environment, even though their tortured characters exist in timeframes more than 50 years apart.
The director’s gift for enlivening scenes with canny soundtrack selections (the film’s title references a 1968 track by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich) includes an inspired use of Cilla Black’s You’re My World.
Dame Diana Rigg delivers her final screen performance as an eccentric landlady while Terence Stamp merrily chews scenery as the tangled connective tissue between the film’s blood-soaked timeframes.
Last Night In Soho becomes increasingly laboured as Eloise joins forces with kind classmate John (Michael Ajao) to unravel Sandie’s grim fate and repair her fracturing sanity.
Strip away the nostalgic styling and Wright’s film is a familiar ghost story.
McKenzie and Taylor-Joy are well-matched heroines at the mercy of plot mechanics, the latter teasing the underlying menace with her haunting cover version of Petula Clark’s Downtown.
Bright lights, big city, bigger disappointment.