Review: Director Edgar Wright paints an impressively lurid picture of 1960s London in Last Night in Soho - The Globe and Mail

Matt Smith and Anya Taylor-Joy star in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho.Parisa Taghizadeh/Courtesy of Focus Features

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• Last Night in Soho
• Directed by Edgar Wright
• Written by Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns
• Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith and Diana Rigg
• Classification PG; 116 minutes
• Opens in theatres Oct. 29

For Edgar Wright’s macabre, hallucinatory ode to London’s swinging mid-1960s, the theme song is Downtown, made famous by Petula Clark: “Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city, linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty.” And, indeed, in an early scene of Last Night in Soho, we watch the telegenic Thomasin McKenzie as the young and naive Eloise Cooper, soaking up a nighttime street scene of London in the mod time of Twiggy and giddy hedonism.

But where Clark’s version of Downtown smiles, what is heard in Last Night in Soho is hauntingly rendered a cappella, asking “How can you lose?” not in a carefree rhetorical way but as a suggestion of awful possibilities. Wright’s visually sumptuous, often satisfying (though ultimately disappointing) psychological thriller gleefully explores the grim side of a beloved era, with a killer soundtrack that just might leave someone dead.

The film is set in modern times, but Eloise pines for the sixties. An orphan who lives with her grandmother in the countryside, she wistfully plays vintage 45s in her bedroom and revels in old-fashioned décor. The record player spins the sad-sack sounds of Peter and Gordon’s melancholic 1964 hit A World Without Love: “Please lock me away and don’t allow the day here inside, where I hide, with my loneliness.”

Thomasin McKenzie plays Eloise in Last Night in Soho.Parisa Taghizadeh/Courtesy of Focus Features

A loner, Eloise wants to go to London to study fashion design. Something happened to her mother in the city years ago though, and the daughter seems to share’s her late mother’s fragile emotionality and an extrasensory trait of taking in too much. Her grandmother warns her about London. Will it be a mental overload for Eloise? Does “foreshadow” have 10 letters and start with an “F”?

But off she goes to the big city. Right off the bat Eloise runs into a dormitory of mean girls and moves off campus to an old boarding house run by an old woman. Landlady Ms. Collins (played by Diana Rigg in her final role) is a tough dame, all doilies and furrowed brows.

After bad days at school she goes to bed and dreams herself into a groovy London nightlife, circa ‘65. The effect is literally night and day. She wanders around wide-eyed, quickly becoming immersed in (and infatuated with) the life of the beautiful young singer Sandie, played by Anya Taylor-Joy.

Dame Diana Rigg stars as Ms. Collins in her final role.Parisa Taghizadeh/Courtesy of Focus Features

In the time-travelling dream scenes, Eloise and Sandie often become one and the same, with the former sometimes seeing herself as the latter in mirrors. This is where Wright’s filmmaking vision and chops shine. The editing and camera work are dazzling. The viewer is liable to be swept up in the magic as much as the story’s protagonist.

With films such as Last Night in Soho and 2017′s Baby Driver, Wright lives to impress us, in the way of Hitchcock or Tarantino. Of course, Hitchcock is alleged to have treated his female stars disgustingly. Wright takes dead aim at misogyny by presenting the male gatekeepers of the era as monsters. Just like the horrible conduct toward female performers still exists today, Eloise’s nightmares don’t stop when she awakens in the real world.

So, ugliness behind the neon. Something for the young nostalgics to consider.

Despite Wright’s best efforts (and a fine turn from the ever-ominous Terence Stamp as the Silver Haired Gentleman), the film’s second half devolves into shlock. And not even in a fun, camp way. One supposes it was done in homage to the lurid British horror films of the 1960s, but it presents more like spoof.

Occasionally there’s a film that you remember fondly from years before, but are embarrassed after revisiting it. I got that feeling with just one viewing of Last Night in Soho. A story in which the dead have voices tells us that some things are better left buried.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)

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Review: Director Edgar Wright paints an impressively lurid picture of 1960s London in Last Night in Soho - The Globe and Mail
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