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Feb 15, 2022 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

A young clothing designer, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), obsessed with the 1960s, moves from the countryside into the heart of London, where she hopes to apply her scholarship to a fancy arts college as a stepping stone into the fashion industry. After a bad night out in Soho with her catty classmates and some bullying from her nasty roommate, Eloise looks for off-campus housing—and lucks into a studio apartment that looks like it was last redecorated in 1962.

Matters only worsen for Ellie, though, when she begins slipping into vivid hallucination each night. These visions involve a talented singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who lived in her apartment six decades before her arrival. Sandie gets involved with a slimy manager (Matt Smith), and her life quickly spirals out of control. At night, Eloise is trapped by these waking dreams; by day, she’s haunted by ghosts from Sandie’s past. She’s unable to convince others that what she’s experience is real—with a family history of schizophrenia, her too-real nightmares are written off as a mental breakdown.

The latest film from Edgar Wright, Last Night in Soho is a visually exciting psychological thriller, where the bursts of light and color come from the neon signs that line the shadowy streets of London’s Soho district. Eloise’ “dreams” are marvels in their own right, with much of their magic done in-camera. (The two female leads, McKenzie and Taylor-Joy, follow each other through these scenes with impeccably-choreographed mirroring.) There’s a dance number in a Sixties night club that’s the most impressive, with a camera circling the leads, who switch places repeatedly in their dance with Smith, who doesn’t break a step. It’s these overtly stylish moments that keep the pace humming in a story that probably could have been told in twenty fewer minutes. Last Night in Soho is at its best when it revels in its scenes of retro glitz, or leans full-bore into the horror elements—it’s the weird middle ground in between these two sides, where a little too much screen time is dedicated to Eloise’ life as a college student or her getting an after-school job, when the movie starts to drag.

If you’re able to play a 4K UHD disc on your entertainment system, that’s the best way to grab Last Night in Soho for home viewing. It’s a great-looking movie with over-the-top lighting and production design, and the contrasting colors deserve to be seen with the aid of HDR. Extras are plentiful, if of a somewhat canned-feeling EPK tone—still, it’s very cool to see how the movie’s many visual tricks were pulled off with so little digital aid.