Last Night in Soho drops you in its hallucinogenic horrors

Like a mesmerising drug, Anya Taylor-Joy’s new movie seduces you and then abandons you in its hallucinogenic horrors.

Most people love to indulge in a bit of nostalgia, remind themselves of a time that they believed was better, simpler, had superior music or fashion.

But nostalgia can be a dangerous thing – and those pining for a bygone era often forget that the Greek root of the word is both “return home” and “pain”.

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho marries that yearning and agony in a hallucinogenic, frightening and stylish package, a psychological horror that seduces you before it abandons you in its terrors.

Directed by Wright from a script he co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, Last Night in Soho stars Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terence Stamp and Diana Rigg. Rigg died not long after the production and this marks her final onscreen performance.

4Thomasin McKenzie and Michael Ajao in Last Night in Soho. Picture: Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features

Eloise (McKenzie) is a young woman from a country town in Cornwall. Her bedroom in her grandmother’s house is replete with 60s-era accoutrement, from her Twiggy and Audrey posters to her vintage vinyls, altars to her romanticisation of the period.

When she’s accepted to fashion school in London, she’s chuffed to be living in the Big Smoke, even as she’s repeatedly warned that “London can be a lot”. Oh, and she also sees the ghost of her dead mum in mirrors.

Eloise moves into a top-floor bedsit of the elderly Mrs Collins in Fitzrovia, just north of the buzzing Soho, and she feels more at home in its outdated furnishings than she did in the sterile student housing.

That first night, she falls asleep to the flashing blue and pink neon lights of the sign outside her window casting a dreamy pall over her room, and she’s transported to Soho in the late-1960s.

Eloise follows Sandie down the stairs of the Cafe de Paris. Picture: Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features

She first watches and then interchangeably becomes luminous aspiring singer Sandie (Taylor-Joy), mirroring her down the stairs of Café de Paris. Sandie meets talent manager Jack (Smith), who promises to put her on stage but there’s a double meaning to his words.

At first Eloise is flush with excitement at the prospect of plunging back into that dream world – if that’s what it is – but those night-time assignations soon become nightmares and Eloise’s mind fractures between what’s there and what’s not.

Last Night in Soho is a haunted story about the ghosts of the past penetrating, disrupting the present reality.

Last Night in Soho is a trippy experience. Picture: Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features

The plotting is a little uneven and Eloise’s characterisation is a little thin, which rarely rises above an ingenue who may or may not be crazy, despite McKenzie’s mod-eyed intensity.

But the film is a visceral experience of dazzling visuals, hypnotic vibes and a wholly original conceit. It’s constantly swirling as Last Night in Soho sustains the tension and its momentum, catching you off guard time and again.

Even when it tips into the realm of the ridiculous – which, given Wright’s comedic sensibilities could very well be intentional – Last Night in Soho is, if nothing else, never boring.

Imaginative and gripping, it’s like a mesmerising drug, a trippy sensation that grabs you and doesn’t let go.

Rating: 3.5/5

Last Night in Soho is in cinemas now

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Originally published as Last Night in Soho drops you in its hallucinogenic horrors