Ellie Turner, a teenager with aspirations to become a fashion designer, moves from her home in Cornwall to study at the London College of Fashion, then situated in Soho. (Since the film was made it has moved to Stratford in East London). Unusually for a modern teen, Ellie loves the music and the fashion of the Swinging Sixties, perhaps because she herself was named after a sixties pop song, Barry Ryan's "Eloise". Indeed, the film itself is named after another song from the era, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich's "Last Night in Soho". Ellie is always playing sixties music, especially songs by girl singers such as Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark, and tries to reflect the look of the period in her fashion designs.
After falling out with her unsympathetic roommate Jocasta, Ellie moves into a bedsit owned by an elderly landlady, Ms. Collins. Soon after moving, Ellie discovers that she can travel back in time to the sixties where she has visions of Sandie, a young woman of the period with ambitions of becoming a singer. At first Ellie is intoxicated by the glamour of the era, but a common theme of time-travel movies (as in something like "Pleasantville") is that the good old days were never as good as we like to think.
Soho is today a smart and respectable area of central London, but in the sixties there was a a darker side to the district. It may have been the home of Carnaby Street, the centre of London's fashion industry, but it was also the centre of London's sex industry and vice trade. Sandie thinks that she is on the path to fame when she finds a boyfriend, Jack, who promises to act as her manager, but he turns out to be cruel and abusive, forcing her to work first as a stripper, then as a prostitute. Eventually Ellie has a horrifying vision in which she believes she sees Jack murdering Sandie. I won't summarise the rest of the plot, but it becomes very dark and sinister, changing from a "Pleasantville"-style anti-nostalgic parable to a supernatural horror film.
The film introduced me to a new star, the New Zealand-born Thomasin McKenzie as Ellie. She gives an excellent performance, playing her character as a sweet, sensitive but mentally troubled girl, whose retreat into nostalgia for a period several decades before she was born is perhaps rooted in the difficulties she has in dealing with the modern world. It may also have something to do with the fact that she was raised by her grandmother, who would have been a young woman in the sixties, after her mother committed suicide. Other good performances come from Anya Taylor-Joy as the glamorous and self-confident Sandie, whose confidence proves sadly misplaced, and from Diana Rigg as Ms. Collins, a character who plays a more important role in the second half of the film and who turns out to be not the respectable old lady she initially seems. This was Rigg's last film, as she died shortly after it was completed and before it was released.
The film is also visually attractive, recreating the London of the sixties with the same loving detail that "heritage cinema" productions devote to their recreations of the Victorian or Edwardian eras. In some ways it reminded me of another British horror film I saw recently, the M R James television adaptation "A View from a Hill", screened as part of the "Ghost Story for Christmas" series. The two films represent different styles of horror, "A View from a Hill" being made in the more traditional understated British way with the horrific elements being implied rather than shown directly, and "Last Night in Soho" being much more direct in this respect. What they have in common is that both are rooted in British history and British culture rather than simply trying to imitate Hollywood. The Swinging London of the sixties is now becoming recognised as being as much a part of our cultural inheritance as the Victorian era or the Age of Shakespeare. Director Edgar Wright here reminds us that there was more to the period than just fun and glamour. 7/10.
After falling out with her unsympathetic roommate Jocasta, Ellie moves into a bedsit owned by an elderly landlady, Ms. Collins. Soon after moving, Ellie discovers that she can travel back in time to the sixties where she has visions of Sandie, a young woman of the period with ambitions of becoming a singer. At first Ellie is intoxicated by the glamour of the era, but a common theme of time-travel movies (as in something like "Pleasantville") is that the good old days were never as good as we like to think.
Soho is today a smart and respectable area of central London, but in the sixties there was a a darker side to the district. It may have been the home of Carnaby Street, the centre of London's fashion industry, but it was also the centre of London's sex industry and vice trade. Sandie thinks that she is on the path to fame when she finds a boyfriend, Jack, who promises to act as her manager, but he turns out to be cruel and abusive, forcing her to work first as a stripper, then as a prostitute. Eventually Ellie has a horrifying vision in which she believes she sees Jack murdering Sandie. I won't summarise the rest of the plot, but it becomes very dark and sinister, changing from a "Pleasantville"-style anti-nostalgic parable to a supernatural horror film.
The film introduced me to a new star, the New Zealand-born Thomasin McKenzie as Ellie. She gives an excellent performance, playing her character as a sweet, sensitive but mentally troubled girl, whose retreat into nostalgia for a period several decades before she was born is perhaps rooted in the difficulties she has in dealing with the modern world. It may also have something to do with the fact that she was raised by her grandmother, who would have been a young woman in the sixties, after her mother committed suicide. Other good performances come from Anya Taylor-Joy as the glamorous and self-confident Sandie, whose confidence proves sadly misplaced, and from Diana Rigg as Ms. Collins, a character who plays a more important role in the second half of the film and who turns out to be not the respectable old lady she initially seems. This was Rigg's last film, as she died shortly after it was completed and before it was released.
The film is also visually attractive, recreating the London of the sixties with the same loving detail that "heritage cinema" productions devote to their recreations of the Victorian or Edwardian eras. In some ways it reminded me of another British horror film I saw recently, the M R James television adaptation "A View from a Hill", screened as part of the "Ghost Story for Christmas" series. The two films represent different styles of horror, "A View from a Hill" being made in the more traditional understated British way with the horrific elements being implied rather than shown directly, and "Last Night in Soho" being much more direct in this respect. What they have in common is that both are rooted in British history and British culture rather than simply trying to imitate Hollywood. The Swinging London of the sixties is now becoming recognised as being as much a part of our cultural inheritance as the Victorian era or the Age of Shakespeare. Director Edgar Wright here reminds us that there was more to the period than just fun and glamour. 7/10.