Time cracks and splin­ters in the first trail­er for Last Night in Soho

After more than a year of wait­ing beyond the film’s ini­tial release date, Edgar Wright loy­al­ists will be relieved to see a prop­er trail­er for his lat­est film Last Night in Soho at long last. While what’s actu­al­ly going on in the clip remains anyone’s best guess, which is how things are best left with a mys­te­ri­ous project such as this one, we’ve been assured that a phan­tas­magor­i­cal trip into ter­ror awaits us.

The trail­er begins with a present-day fash­ion stu­dent played by Thomasin McKen­zie, spend­ing her class ses­sions sketch­ing a chic blonde in swing­ing ​’60s Lon­don cou­ture. Imag­ine her sur­prise when she awak­ens to find her­self trans­port­ed back to the pre­cise place and time of her fan­tasies, free to tra­verse a peri­od of greater glam­our and grime for the seedy Soho neighborhood.

But mat­ters get stranger as she dis­cov­ers that her iden­ti­ty has begun to frac­ture, mak­ing her appear to those around her as the girl she once drew, played in the film by Anya Tay­lor-Joy. Her romance with a smooth oper­a­tor (Matt Smith) seems like a good time, until the mem­brane between the two eras begins to dis­in­te­grate, along with the divide between the two linked young women.

Splash­es of col­or hark back to the gial­lo night­mares of ​’70s Italy and the arms burst­ing out of the floor and walls recall Repul­sion, but the dom­i­nant ref­er­ence here may be Ing­mar Bergman’s Per­sona, anoth­er instance of one woman bleed­ing into anoth­er. (In this instance, that may be lit­er­al.) But the ​“per­sona-swap” film, a noble tra­di­tion stretch­ing from Des­per­ate­ly Seek­ing Susan to Queen of Earth and beyond, has nev­er hewn so close­ly to horror.

With cin­e­mas round­ing a cor­ner on the COVID-19 shut­downs, the time is final­ly right for a movie of true movie-ness, with the grand sets (the Thun­der­ball bill­board recalls Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, across the pond) and immer­sive effect that the term implies. It just feels so much bet­ter to release a scream of fear in an audi­to­ri­um, as part of one big pet­ri­fied chorus.

Last Night in Soho comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 22 Octo­ber, and then the UK on 29 October.