Last Night in Soho (2021)
As with Licorice Pizza last week Last Night in Soho was a film i'd heard just enough about to intrigue me into wanting to buy and watch without delving too deeply into their story lines before hand.
And just like Licorice Pizza this was fantastic.
It follows timid Cornish fashion student Ellie ( a superb Thomasin McKenzie) obsessed with the sixties who moves to London to attend the London College of Fashion. Unhappy with her student digs she moves into the Soho flat of an elderly lady (Diana Rigg).
That night Ellie dreams of being back in sixties Soho where she observes or perhaps becomes Sandie (An equally impressive Anya Taylor-Joy) as she goes about trying to become a night club singer at the Cafe De Paris and falls for the charms of wide boy entertainment manager Jack (A very out of character Matt Smith).
Pretty much from then on things get really f*cked up as dream blends with reality and ghosts from the past enter the present day with shocking results.
Imagine if you will 1959's Beat Girl crossed with The Woman in Black with an Argento-esq finale and that sort of sums up Last Night in Soho. It's a love letter to the swinging sixties but not the cool sixties, no, this is the sixties usually featured in messed up BFI Flipside releases by the likes of Gerry O' Hara and Arnold Miller. A sixties of degradation, permissiveness, sleaze and violence.
I really didn't know where the film was heading at all and the denouement was both unexpected and grittily violent as the film transformed from dark fairy tale to a nightmarish supernatural horror. There's such a juxtaposition from the stunning first eye opening shot of sixties London as Ellie appears opposite a cinema showing Thunderball (a sequence that looks magical on Blu-ray) to what happens at the end.
Director Edgar Wright has given the film a superb soundtrack of sixties music as well as songs which could be sixties music. From Taylor-Joy's gorgeous melancholy rendition of Petula Clark's Downtown to Sandie Shaw, The Kinks, The Who and Siousxie and the Banshees. Wright makes the songs as pivotal to the film as he did with his last outing Baby Driver (2017) and it all sounds so stunning in Dolby ATMOS.
Last Night in Soho is a neon drenched fantasy horror drama with a killer soundtrack that is a wonderful antithesis to the formulaic sequels and reboots clogging up cinema today. I heartily recommend it.
|