LAST NIGHT IN SOHO

 As well as being a smart, infectiously enjoyable entertainment Edgar Wright's "Last Night in Soho" is also a real treat for the cineaste in us. Yes, it's a fantasy and a slasher movie but it's a terrific throwback to the kind of British cinema that all but disappeared in the seventies as well as a love-letter to London, past and present.

Eloise, (Thomasin McKenzie, excellent), is a design student in the present who, on her first trip to London, enters the wonderland that is Soho in the sixties, quite literally just like Alice, becoming, it would appear, her glamorous alter-ego Sandie, (a fantastic Anya Taylor-Joy), whose dream it is to become a singer. Did Eloise dream this or did she really go back in time and where did she get that love bite on her neck?

Wright's sixties London is an amalgam of real streets and the studio-bound London of so many movies, now shot in gloriously garish colour and the more Eloise retreats into Sandie's past the more she seems to become Sandie and the more the 1960's become the film's third character and, in so far as they are still around, Wright peoples his film with throwbacks from the period like Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham and a superb Diana Rigg in her final film, filling the soundtrack with a roster of classic pop, (the film's title comes from a song by the little-known band Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich).

What begins as a love letter, however, soon turns into a poison-pen letter and the movie that most readily comes to mind is Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" as Eloise's dream becomes a nightmare, (there are murders and there are ghosts as Eloise goes from victim to girl detective and back to victim again), as past and present finally meet and it's clear that Wright is as much in love with films like "Beat Girl" and "The Flesh is Weak" as he is with cinema in general. This is a deliciously dark and hugely enjoyable film and one that Wright can be rightly proud of.