Last Night In Soho (TBC)
Rating: 
We romanticise the past at our peril; it can take us to places we don’t want to go. That is the message of British director Edgar Wright’s brilliant film, Last Night In Soho, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday.
Wright made his name with the so-called ‘Cornetto trilogy’ of comedies (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End).
But he has since made a terrific action thriller, 2017’s Baby Driver, and now proves himself a master of psychological horror as Last Night in Soho exerts a fierce grip from the start and never lets go.
We romanticise the past at our peril; it can take us to places we don’t want to go. That is the message of British director Edgar Wright’s brilliant film, Last Night In Soho, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday. Pictured: Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Msith in Last Night in Soho
Not only that, but the film affords us our last look at the glorious Diana Rigg, who died aged 82 shortly after completing her work on the film, and also has parts for veterans Terence Stamp, 83, and Rita Tushingham, 79. Indeed Sixties iconography is everywhere in this movie, including the cast list.
But it begins in the present day, in a bedroom in Cornwall.
Ellie (the New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie, making a decent fist of her West Country vowels) is dancing to A World Without Love, the 1964 song by Peter and Gordon.
A whisk around the room shows us that she’s in love with the Swinging Sixties. And her dearest wish is to move to London to study fashion, so that she might one day follow in the footsteps of Mary Quant. A letter arrives. Thrillingly, Ellie has been accepted into a fashion college on the edge of Soho.
Her grandmother (Tushingham) is thrilled too but warns her, ‘London can be a lot’. It was too much for Ellie’s mother, who died of suicide years earlier.
Not only that, but the film affords us our last look at the glorious Diana Rigg (pictured), who died aged 82
