A stylish ode to ’60s London
Nostalgia can offer history a brighter, more exciting and decidedly rose-colored sheen. This is the question filmmaker Edgar Wright and co-writer Krysty WilsonCairns pick up in “Last Night in Soho,” a neondrenched, blood-soaked trip through the swinging ’60s of Soho, London, as experienced through modern eyes. In this gialloinspired psychological slasher film, Wright and Wilson-Cairns explore the psychic connection between the past and present, investigating the spirits that haunt the spaces we occupy. It’s a colorful, hallucinatory throwback and a wild ride through the mind.
The modern eyes of “Last Night in Soho” belong to Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), a young fashion student from Cornwall obsessed with all the music and fashion of the 1960s, venturing to the big city for the first time to attend college. Her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) is worried about her sensitive granddaughter, as
Ellie is attuned to other planes of spectral existence, frequently visited by visions of ghosts, including her mother.
Ellie is determined to hack it in London, but her horrible roommate and dorm shenanigans drive her to rent a room from an older woman, Ms. Collins (the late Diana Rigg). The room, which thousands of girls have rented over the years, has vintage charm and a flashing neon French bistro light outside her window, setting the surreal scene for Ellie to dive into her psychic, psychedelic dream world. She encounters a fetching young blonde from the mid-1960s, Sandie (Anya
Taylor-Joy), with big dreams and an even bigger bouffant. With winged eyeliner out to there, Sandie’s got all the swaggering confidence that Ellie doesn’t, and stepping into her perfectly soigne shoes for an evening is powerfully intoxicating, until Sandie’s ultra-cool existence becomes a nightmare.
If “Last Night in Soho” was just a guise to get the luminous Taylor-Joy to shake a tail-feather whilst clad in vintage costumes, it would be worth the price of admission, because indeed, the film’s most pleasurable moments are the expressionistic sequences when Sandie hits the dance floor with abandon, though she attracts all kinds of unsavory men, including her manager, Jack (Matt Smith). These dream scenes in which Ellie and Sandie become doubles, seen only in mirrored reflections, are stunning achievements of filmmaking.
As Ellie’s reality starts to blur between the past and present, and the violence of Sandie’s broken dreams infects her mind, her mental state starts to spiral out of control. McKenzie’s performance becomes increasingly histrionic at a level that’s challenging to sustain, though her hysteria provides an apt foil for the always-composed Sandie and the tough-asnails Ms. Collins. But when the film ventures away from dazzling practical spectacle and enters the realm of computer-generated ghouls, it loses a bit of its magic and takes on a cheesy sort of “Doctor Who” vibe, which was, perhaps, intended, though the effect eventually wanes.
The cinematography, soundtrack and sumptuous costumes by Odile Dicks-Mireaux create an impeccable aesthetic, but the overstuffed story of “Last Night in Soho” wobbles toward the end. This post-modern feminist horror film re-imagines an era that objectified women, but as the stakes escalate, the film’s moralities and loyalties start to waver. This visual and aural feast does have a stumble or two on the dance floor, though in the 11th hour, Wright does manage to right the ship, with an assist from the always reliable Taylor-Joy.
MPAA rating: R (for bloody violence, sexual content, language, brief drug material and brief graphic nudity) Running time: 1:56
Where to watch: In theaters Oct. 29