Last Night In Soho

There's a quite a bit of filler in Edgar Wright's new psychological horror, especially in it's second half and for a moment you might fear it's going to end in a very unsatisfactory manner but then it clicks, everything becomes clear, previous scenes make sense and you'll remember why you'd enjoyed his earlier films. Forget the bombast and bluster of the godawful Scott Pilgrim Vs The World or the cloying try hardness of The World's End. No, this is the work of someone playing in a sandbox they love. It shows.

Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) has hit London with a plan. She wants to design clothes and has travelled across England to make a name for herself. London though, it takes it toll , she was warned and it's coming true rapidly. Not fitting in with student life she rents a bedsit in Soho from Mrs Collins (Diana Rigg in her final role) and the room starts getting under her skin when her night time dreams transport her back to the swinging sixties of London. In her dreams her avatar is Sandy (Anya Taylor Joy), a would be singing starlet looking for fame. She takes up with Jack (Matt Smith), a manager who promises her the world but delivers her into the sordid underworld of celebrity instead. Soon Eloise's dreamworld starts to bleed into her reality and it's only a matter of time before it starts getting dangerous.

Yup, that's the stuff. Wright has fully moved away from comedy and here delivers a dark, twisting, surprisingly vicious look at the dark side of stardom, at male violence in it's myriad forms and how both too often intertwine. It's at it's best in it's first half, setting the stage, laying on the alienation (Synnøve Karlsen as Jocasta, her first roommate is a hateful creation), making Eloise the perfect conduit for all ghostly goings on.....or are they ghostly. We know she's troubled, there's mental illness in her past, things are ambiguous, purposefully so, there's shades of Polanski's Repulsion here, tinges of giallo and then full on eurohorror takes centre stage. It starts to get messy, a bit too repetitive and padded as messages get hammered home but as things start to come together near the end you'll be too busy gawping at the gaudily coloured chaos on screen to care.

There's a neon sign outside Eloise's bedroom window and it bathes her room in deep blues and reds throughout the film. It belongs to a French bistro but may as well say DARIO ARGENTO in huge flashing letters. Wright's never been shy with his homages but this one is hilariously on the nose, speaking to a love of the horror genre that gets a real run out as Sandy's 60's life goes from glamorous to horrifying courtesy of a nightmarish escape through the bowels of a venue that feels like the stuff of fever dreams. It's here the first half of the film's glorious evocation of 60's London flips and we see the worms beneath, the truth of the place, not the version that only ever existed on the silver screen. A place where flesh was a commodity, indulged in by sweating, leering creeps. Until one night.......a night that's seared into Eloise's retinas. To see her go from bright eyed and bushy tailed to buoyed by confidence created by dream inspirations to a screaming wreck is tough going but Thomasin McKenzie sells it perfectly.

It's her film but it's Anya Taylor-Joy's Sandy that has the biggest impact. She's brilliant. The embodiment of old school glamour kicked off with a wicked dancefloor routine in a smoky club that just oozes dangerous cool. Like Eloise, Wright's love for the time period is apparent and to really lay it on thick screen icons of the time like Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham and Diana Rigg all play a big part in proceedings. Rigg especially, in her final screen appearance really plays a memorable part in it all. The lady had presence. She'll be missed but goddamn what a way to go.

Last Night In Soho is out now. It's too long, it's messy and it repeats itself but if you let it this surreal and beautiful looking hybrid of psychological horror and shrieking melodrama will grip you tight. 

Oh and the soundtrack is just *chef's kiss*