LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

Cert 18 ★★★ In cinemas now

Brit director Edgar Wright made his name blending horror and comedy with Shaun Of The Dead. Now he’s back with another genre-hopper about a time-travelling, crime-solving, psychic teenager. Shy wannabe fashion designer teenager Eloise (Thomasin Mckenzie) has inherited her love of Swinging Sixties London from her mentally ill mother who took her own life when Eloise was a child.

In the opening scene, we see her dancing around her bedroom in a startlingly accomplished gown made from newspapers. Eloise wins a place at the London College of Fashion and heads to the capital, leaving her

worried gran (Rita Tushingham) behind in the Cornish town of Redruth.

After being bullied by the mean girls in her halls of residence, she moves into Diana Rigg’s Fitzrovia lodging house, taking what must be an extremely well-paid job in a Soho pub to pay that central London rent.

But the room comes with an

unexpected benefit. Whenever she goes to sleep, Eloise travels back to her favourite decade where she takes the form of a Soho club singer called Sandie (Anya Taylor-joy) who is dating her sleazy manager Jack (Matt Smith).

Now the coming-of-age drama has turned into a big-budget Goodnight Sweetheart, as astonishing special effects recreate the West End of the 1960s.

The visions give Eloise a new confidence, wowing her tutor with designs for retro frocks, but her nostalgia trips take a sinister turn. Male violence erupts in the past and begins to spill into the present.

Sadly, Wright can’t craft enough scares or surprises as the film morphs into a horror.

This engaging film is beautifully designed but his twists are too clearly signposted and his characters too thinly drawn.

SLEAZY Matt Smith as Jack, with Anya Taylor-joy as Soho club singer Sandie

STUDENT Thomasin Mckenzie