The first time I went to London was as a child with my mother in the Sixties. I still have vivid memories of that trip: watching Mary Poppins, finding a cinema in Piccadilly Circus which only showed cartoons (in the Seventies it changed hands and showed porn round the clock). There was an innocence in the air. In Last Night in Soho, director and co-writer Edgar Wright has beautifully created that era. Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who lives with her grandmother (Rita Tushingham, sixties star of films such as A Taste of Honey and Doctor Zhivago) wins a place in the University of the Arts in London to study fashion design. She doesn’t like the university accommodation, particularly her roommate and rents a room in a house in Soho belonging to an old lady called Ms Collins (Diana Rigg in her final performance and to whom the movie is dedicated). Eloise begins to have apparitions of a young girl in the sixties called Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Sandie has dreams of becoming a famous singer. Soho in London is famous for two things: one is that it is the centre of the UK entertainment industry, the Hollywood of Britain and the second, less honourable reputation is being the infamous London red light district. Many women who venture to Soho to make a name in the entertainment business, find themselves sporting an alias name, living in a shabby room adorned with a bed, working as a sex-worker. Sandie pins her hopes on a shady cabaret manager called Jack (Matt Smith), who promises her a golden future, but what he delivers may be something entirely different.
In parallel with the life of Eloise in the present time, we follow, through Eloise’s dreams and nightmares, Sandie’s life in the sixties and her struggles to make it big in Soho. The dreams become increasingly more sinister and nightmarish. Eloise becomes convinced that in the past, in the room that she is living, murders have occurred. These sequences are very skillfully and creatively staged by Edgar Wright. A mysterious old man (played by another sixties icon, Terence Stamp) also appears and the separation between present and past become increasingly blurred. One of the best sequences is Eloise’s first venture into the sixties in her dreams. She walks into Piccadilly Circus and a cinema there is adorned with a huge poster of the James Bond movie Thunderball. Wright recreates many iconic sixties places, the Rialto Theatre, Carnaby Street, Café de Paris. Cilla Black (Beth Singh) is shown belting out her classics You Are My World and Anyone Who Had a Heart in a cabaret, the iconic sixties store Biba is mentioned, the soundtrack is jammed pack with records by the sixties bands and artists including The Searchers, The Kinks, Sandie Shaw, The Walker Brothers and Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich.
Eloise’s hallucinations become more and more frightening and here the influence of films by George Romero, Dario Argento and Peter Strickland such as Night of the Living Dead (Romero), Suspiria (Argento) and Berberian Sound Studio (Strickland), becomes more evident. Last Night in Soho also is also reminiscent of the British horror movies of the fifties and sixties, specially those made by Hammer Films. Anyone with a sense of nostalgia for the Swinging Sixties London is likely to get more enjoyment out of this film. Technically Last Night in Soho is very accomplished and the performances, both by the sixties icons and the relatively newcomers, are excellent and right on the nose. Anya Taylor-Joy in particular truly shines in her role as Sandie and adds yet another triumph in her increasingly impressive resume. Though Last Night in Soho may not be to everyone’s taste, in the current deluge of horror films it stands out as highly inventive and creative.