FILM

Thu 15th Sep 7.45pm: LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (18) 2021, UK, 116min, dir Edgar Wright. Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Thomas McKenzie, Matt Smith

In acclaimed director Edgar Wright’s psychological thriller, Eloise, an aspiring fashion designer, is mysteriously able to enter the 1960s where she encounters a dazzling wannabe singer, Sandie. But the glamour is not all it appears to be and the dreams of the past start to crack and splinter into something far darker. ‘Wright merges the high style of Italian giallo cinema with the neon-hued aesthetics of London in the Swinging Sixties. With a name deriving from the Italian word for yellow, giallo was based on the nation’s pulpy crime fiction, whose paperbacks had yellow spines to signify their genre. Visually indebted to the work of genre masters Mario Bava, Umberto Lenzi and Dario Argento thanks to its fabricated gore and foregrounded sadism, the film is a layered, suspenseful thriller, at once expressive and ominous… As Eloise sinks deeper and deeper into the past, the line between reality and hallucination blurs, and faceless ghosts start to appear in the present. She decides to confront her demons by getting to the bottom of an unsolved 1960s murder, in which Sandie appears to have been involved. The film follows a giallo-style plot and appropriates its visual language with an array of vibrant, fear-inducing reds, blues and purples’ Alasdair Bayman, Curzon.