Last Night in Soho: New horror ends in uncertain, muddy territory

It takes a while for Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho – a film that bumps to Earth as often as it takes flight – to confirm how it will deviate from the director's usual habits. It certainly sounds like an Edgar Wright film. Thomasin McKenzie plays a young woman from contemporary Cornwall who, shortly after arriving in London to study fashion, gets magically transported to Soho of the 1960s. A murderer is on the streets. Perhaps he is still hanging about the 21st-century pub run by Pauline McLynn (you will know it's her the moment you hear the voice off screen). That feels like something the director of Hot Fuzz and The World's End might get up to.

Wright has, however, ditched his crazy wipes and furious cuts for a more sedate style of film-making. You won’t laugh much because, though some critics have already described it as such, it isn’t really a comedy (nor was his Baby Driver, to be fair). A glimpse of a marquee advertising Dr Terror’s House of Horrors hints we are going for something akin to the jaunty, shocker territory of that mid-60s anthology romp. Fair enough. The allusions elsewhere to Roman Polanksi’s Repulsion warn of a grasp beyond the film-maker’s reach.

It hardly matters that the central conceit is only vaguely sketched. McKenzie's Ellie, who worships 1960s culture, is cast back partly within and partly beside the persona of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring club singer. That is to say, sometimes Ellie watches her and sometimes she seems to actually be her. In the 1960s, Sandie falls in with a local hoodlum (Matt Smith). In the 2020s, Ellie counters bullies and settles in with an intimidating landlady (Diana Rigg, given plenty to do in her last role). It matters a little more that the latter stages of the plot – punctuated by some uninteresting spectres – rattle madly to a borderline-arbitrary ending.

The immersion in a largely imagined world remains diverting. Though she travelled from a different compass point, Ellie's adventures point where Julie Christie's character might have landed after Billy Liar if she had more of Billy's uncertainty. Rita Tushingham and Terence Stamp are here to help Rigg flesh out the era's old guard. Most impressively, the script from Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns does as much work deglamourising the era as it does celebrating it. The film is particularly strong on how women were degraded in the entertainment and sex industries.

Yet Last Night in Soho ends up in uncertain, muddy territory. There is both too much and too little going on. It passes the time busily, but leaves us lost in copious allusion and unfinished narrative. Maybe that is how it felt at the time.

Opens on October 29th