Last Night in Soho – first-look review

Gial­lo comes to swing­ing Lon­don in Edgar Wright’s lat­est genre-fried runaround, a sparky enter­tain­ment whose tricksy, hop-scotch­ing screen­play sad­ly fiz­zles out by its final act. You could eas­i­ly spend the entire word count of a review list­ing all of the cul­tur­al ref­er­ences that have fed into the cre­ation of Last Night in Soho, but let’s just stick to two for now: the first is Wes Craven’s Night­mare on Elm Street, for the sim­ple fact that this is about a young woman who begins to expe­ri­ence a wor­ry­ing­ly tac­tile ver­sion of her dream life; and the oth­er is Roman Polanski’s Repul­sion, a clas­sic Lon­don movie con­cerned with the creep­ing ter­ror of unchecked male lechery.

Thomasin McKen­zie stars as Eloise, Redruth’s most promis­ing fash­ion design­er with an invite to live out her dreams by study­ing in Lon­don. After quick­ly dis­cov­er­ing that every­one in her dorm is an unbear­able rah-rah, she decamps to the attic stu­dio in the crum­bling Fitzrovia stack of lov­ably dod­dery Miss Collins (Diana Rigg) who appears to cher­ish Eloise’s wide-eyed innocence.

It is then that our hero­ine begins to expe­ri­ence lucid night­time visions of a glam­orous and con­fi­dent cabaret dancer named Sadie (Anya Tay­lor-Joy) who struts her stuff in the ​’60s dance­halls and clip joints of Soho – visions Eloise accepts as the result of her love of pop music from the era. Yet as the nights tick on and Sandie’s sto­ry unfurls, things aren’t as hope­ful as they ini­tial­ly seem. Is Sandie a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Eloisie’s sup­pressed id, a vision of her out­go­ing poten­tial? Or does she stem from some­where else entirely?

There’s that famous scene in the Marx broth­ers’ com­e­dy clas­sic Duck Soup where Har­po pre­tends to be a mir­ror image of Grou­cho by per­fect­ly mim­ic­k­ing his move­ments. This trick fea­tures heav­i­ly in Last Night in Soho, as Wright flex­es his con­sid­er­able tech­ni­cal mus­cles by hav­ing Eloise and Sandie con­stant­ly switch­ing between the fore­ground and a back­ground mir­ror image. These sub­tle spe­cial effects are pulled off with amaz­ing pre­ci­sion, and you real­ly have to pay atten­tion to who’s cen­tre frame and how that plays into its com­plex, iden­ti­ty-toy­ing storyline.

The set-up is fun and com­pelling, the sound­track is rammed with bangers by Cil­la Black, Petu­la Clark and The Kinks, and McKen­zie makes for a breezi­ly empa­thet­ic lead. And yet there’s a point where the sto­ry jumps the shark, and sug­ges­tions of a deep­er, more mature study into the work­ings of the mind, the archi­tec­ture of dreams and even the dynam­ics of depres­sion amount to lit­tle, as Wright and co-writer Krysty Wil­son-Cairns lean far too heav­i­ly on the hoary who­dunit? clichés that are baked into the DNA of the gial­lo genre.

The film is at its best when hold­ing back details and sculpt­ing fine char­ac­ter details, but the inten­si­ty is ramped up far too ear­ly and it becomes increas­ing­ly tough to take the plot seri­ous­ly, or build an emo­tion­al con­nec­tion with its cli­mac­tic rev­e­la­tions. That said, there’s enjoy­ment to be gleaned from the love­ly loca­tion shoot­ing which takes in the length and breadth of Soho while cen­tring around beloved Irish booz­er, The Tou­can. Also, the film is mov­ing­ly ded­i­cat­ed to the late Diana Rigg, and this is most def­i­nite­ly a plum swan­song for the ​’60s icon.

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