‘Last Night in Soho’: Garbled but Good Looking

[peekaboo]

Cinematography is the star of Edgar Wright’s latest, a time-travel tale that takes a young fashion student back to 1960s London, then lurches into a timeworn realm

When you’re watching a good film, it’s as if the filmmaker has taken you by the hand and said, “Come with me, I want to show you something special.” I was glad to go along with Edgar Wright as “Last Night in Soho” got under way, and why not? He’s the man who gave zombies and robots new leases on life in his classic comedy-horror trilogy comprised of “Shaun Of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End.”

His new film held me firmly in its grip with a promising premise. A sweet and timid country mouse, Eloise ( Thomasin McKenzie ), goes to London to study fashion design and is promptly transported, never mind how, to the time and place she has dreamed of, swinging Soho in the mid-1960s. (A new James Bond is playing at the cinema: It’s called “Thunderball.”) Soon Eloise crosses paths with a local beauty who seems to be her alter ego. Sandie, as she calls herself, could hardly be more alter, since she’s played with a dazzling sense of purpose by Anya Taylor-Joy.

So far so good. But then Mr. Wright’s film, which he wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, asked me to cross a street into another genre that amounted to another movie. That’s where I drew the line, and this is where I cut loose from a construction that threatens to sink the review before I get to describe how much fun the film can be until it spins wildly out of control.

And how gorgeous it is. The cinematographer, Chung-hoon Chung, should have been given star billing too. A native of South Korea, he uses the magical intangibles of color and light to make the nighttime Soho exteriors look like a cross between Seoul and Hong Kong. Plus a live-action echo of “Spirited Away,” since this Soho, indoors and out, is haunted by a spectral group of men who darken the hues of Eloise’s romantic fantasy.

Anya Taylor-Joy

Photo: FOCUS FEATURES

It’s easy to see why Mr. Wright and his collaborators wanted to take this tale of the supernatural to another level. Tracking Eloise and Sandie through a series of intersections is fine for a while, a way of reflecting on the odds against dreams coming true, and of dramatizing Eloise’s fear that she’ll follow in the footsteps of her mother, who suffered from mental illness and was overwhelmed by living alone in London. But then what? 

Thomasin McKenzie

Photo: FOCUS FEATURES

Rather than belabor the what that was chosen—the silly lather the story works up—I’ll reflect in my turn on how fine “Last Night In Soho” turns out to be when its co-stars are fully engaged in their eerily mysterious dance of identity. And on two extra treats—seeing Terence Stamp, an emblem of 1960s Swinging London and a film star of the period, as a silver-haired gentleman (whose name in the credits is Silver Haired Gentleman), and Diana Rigg, once the glamorous Emma Peel in the original TV version of “The Avengers.” She plays Ms. Collins, the elderly proprietress of a musty Soho boardinghouse. This is the final film Ms. Rigg made before her death last year. It’s half of a worthy memorial.