If there’s a central theme to Edgar Wright’s new horror-thriller Last Night in Soho, it’s most certainly “the past is not all that it’s cracked up to be.”
The twisty story follows Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer from the English countryside who travels to college in London — a city she’s always been enraptured by, especially for its famously nostalgic “Swinging Sixties” couture. When Eloise rents an apartment owned by Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg), night visions transport her back to 1960s London through the eyes of an upstart nightclub singer (Anya Taylor-Joy). Without spoiling too much, we’ll just say all is not well for the young woman — or the women around her in general.
“I think the dangers of romanticizing the past is to suggest that everything was great and nothing was bad,” Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver), who cowrote the film with Kristy Wilson-Cairns (1917), tells us in a recent virtual press day for the film (watch above). “The phrase ‘the good ole days’ is a fallacy. It’s impossible. There was no perfect decade and people bandy around different times as like a golden age… The [’60s] was obviously an incredible decade in terms of how much changed in culture and everything in society.
