Last Night in Soho (2021)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Eloise "Ellie" Turner	Thomasin McKenzie	½
Alexandra "Sandie" Collins	Anya Taylor-Joy	½
Ms. Collins	Diana Rigg
Jack	Matt Smith	½
John	Michael Ajao	½
Lindsay	Terence Stamp
Margaret "Peggy" Turner	Rita Tushingham	½
Jocasta	Synnøve Karlsen	-

Review

Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim) invites us to a magical recreation of the 1960s and Swinging London for a part homage of the era's music and fashion and part lambasting of the people and values in it. Experiencing it all with a 2021 point of view is Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), an old-fashioned country-girl with psychic powers who moves from Cornwall to London to study at the London College of Fashion and finds that 'London is a bit much', as her grandmother had put it. The originality and fresh angle is there, perhaps even more so than in Wright's other ventures, and for half its running time, Last Night in Soho keeps you pinned in anticipation of what to come and how all its genre-bending pieces will fit together in the end. Along the way we get creative transitions between present-day challenges and 1960s thrills, with immaculately elegant compositions of the latter. We are intrigued by the characters of Jack (Matt Smith), Lindsay (Terence Stamp) and Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg, in her last performance), but as the final third approaches, Wright resorts to cheap horror techniques to keep us unnecessarily in the dark, and the fascinating Stamp character turns out to be badly underdeveloped. The ending is a big let-down and a complete raid of horror-cliches. Yes, Wright's story holds up logically within its own realm, but he had promised us so much more than two-faced cartoon baddies and worn-out ghost explanations.