Last Night in Soho, review: a chilling dance through Swinging London – under Diana Rigg’s eyes
Dir: Edgar Wright. 18 cert, 114 min
Youngsters often move to cities in order to find themselves, but Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) finds someone else. Her name is Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), spelled the Shaw way, and she floats through the night of 1960s London like a human paper-lantern. An inner flame seems to brighten this aspiring singer’s blonde Bardot bouffant and tent dress of coral pink gauze.
As a mousy fashion student who grew up with posters of Twiggy and Sweet Charity on her bedroom walls, Eloise is bewitched, in at least two senses of the word. Raised in rural Cornwall, she’s a child of the early 21st century – but when she pulls the curtains every night at her grotty Goodge Place bedsit, she’s tugged back into 1966 and finds herself in Sandie’s body, drifting through the retro demi-monde for which she’s always yearned.
So – ho! – it goes in Last Night in Soho, the new film from Edgar Wright, director of Baby Driver, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, it’s a riotous, rascally hybrid: part swooning love-letter to the city in which it unfolds, part blood- and tear-stained break-up note. Picture one of those playful-yet-cautionary postwar British dramas about innocent young women from the provinces drifting into the Big Smoke – most of them seemed to star Rita Tushingham, who has a talismanic supporting role here as Eloise’s grandmother – then refract it through the lurid crack-up horror lens of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.
“The lights are much brighter there,” Sandie sings at a murky nightclub audition, offering up a ghostly cover version of Petula Clark’s Downtown. And for a while, at least, Eloise is duly dazzled. During her first night out as Sandie, she sashays through a spellbinding recreation of the West End of the Sixties, every bit as dreamily enveloping as Quentin Tarantino’s 1969 Los Angeles in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As she descends the staircase into the Café de Paris, the song that was playing in her bedroom moments earlier is being performed live on stage by Cilla Black.
Wright explains the two girls’ synchronised but not-quite-synonymous presence with a series of quietly astonishing mirror shots: when they stand opposite one other in floor-length reflection, moments before Matt Smith’s sharply tailored Jack (as in “the lad”) comes to whisk them off to the dance floor, it’s like a swinging-sixties reworking of Groucho and Harpo Marx jigging nose-to-nose in Duck Soup.
Following her acclaimed lead turn in the Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, Taylor-Joy secures her newfound star status: her enormous eyes convey a strange sense that the film is somehow watching you, while her incredible Rorschach-print face makes you second-guess every emotion that plays across it.
But as their shared nocturnal adventures take a dark turn, Eloise’s psyche starts to fracture. What story are the streets trying to tell her? And what roles in it are played by Soho’s few remaining long-term denizens, who experienced its olden days first-hand? In the present, Eloise keeps crossing paths with a sinister, silvery Lothario (Terence Stamp) who seems to know his way around the area’s shadier corners. And her staunchly no-nonsense landlady, Ms Collins, is a great final role for the late Diana Rigg.
Wright is a gifted stylist and master technician, and Soho moves as fluidly as a Maglev train, gliding along on an invisible cushion of its own meticulous craft. The lavish first half especially, with its peculiar sexy-creepy charge, is as smooth and dizzying as vodka: it’s the best thing Wright has directed to date. The second transitions into a more conventional supernatural mystery-thriller – a move that feels overly cautious considering the world the film builds feels like one of endless possibilities.
“London can be a lot,” Eloise is constantly warned – and slyly channelled pop-cinema excess is Last Night in Soho’s strongest, most effortlessly dashing suit.
In cinemas from Friday October 29
