Last Night in Soho

There’s a neat sleight-of-hand at play in Last Night in Soho: it dresses up a grief story in sequins and cigarette smoke so the costume grabs your attention while the story sneaks under your skin. Eloise “Ellie” is a teenager who adores 1960s music and fashion and wants to be a designer — that longing is the hook Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns use to pull us into a world where vintage glamour hides something rotten.

Edgar Wright’s name on the poster promises craft and pace, and he brings both to a 116-minute psychological thriller that pivots between student life in contemporary London and dreamlike trips back to the Swinging Sixties. Thomasin McKenzie plays Ellie; Anya Taylor-Joy turns up as the bright, dangerous centre of Ellie’s visions; Matt Smith is the charming but suspect Jack. The casting gives the film immediate shape without turning it into a simple pastiche. What keeps conversation about the film alive is what happens when the glamour stops being an aesthetic and becomes the very language of danger: Ellie’s visions of another life — glamorous, loud, irresistible — are also where the movie hides its questions about family, mortality and who gets to tell which stories. That tension is why the film still feels worth revisiting.

Ellie arrives in London from the Cornish countryside to study fashion and immediately feels out of step with her peers. Fresh, awkward and grieving — her mother took her own life when Ellie was small — she can’t find her feet in a dorm where one roommate makes life difficult.

To get away from campus misery she takes a bedsit above a Soho building owned by an elderly landlady. That night she slips into a vivid dream: suddenly she’s in the 1960s watching a young blonde singer called Sandie at the Café de Paris. The dream is intoxicating and strange, and it begins to press on Ellie in ways she can’t ignore.

Those visions don’t stay pretty. Ellie finds herself copying Sandie’s look and even waking with evidence that the dream is more than fantasy. When she believes she has seen a murder in one of these journeys, she chases the truth — starting with a man she thinks might be involved.

What makes the hook work is its simplicity: a lonely young woman, fascinated by another era, finds that those fantasies bleed into her life. The setup gives the film clear stakes — belonging, safety and the gap between how the past looked and how it actually felt.

Ellie is the kind of protagonist who gives the audience permission to be curious. She’s sweet, naive and a bit fragile — the film hands her a crush on the 1960s not because it’s fashionable but because it fills the holes left by loss. That desire to belong and to make beautiful things is what makes her easy to root for.

Her backstory is shorthand that earns weight on screen: her mother was a designer who died by suicide, and Ellie was raised by her grandmother. That lineage explains why fashion isn’t just a hobby for her; it’s a way to connect to a mother she barely remembers and to imagine a future she can control.

She also lives with the residue of grief. Ellie sometimes sees her mother in mirrors — not a throwaway spooky trick, but a small, persistent reminder that the past is never tidy. The movie trusts us to feel how that unsettles someone trying to start over in a big city.

Crucially, Ellie’s arc ends where she wanted to begin: she gets her designs shown and is congratulated by the people who matter to her. That resolution keeps the film grounded, turning a tale of haunting into one about survival and the fragile, stubborn business of making your life.

Beneath the ghost story, the film is quietly preoccupied with mortality. Ellie’s relationship to her dead mother — the way she remembers, imagines and sometimes literally sees her — is the emotional current that powers everything. Those moments of grief make the supernatural elements feel less like horror for its own sake and more like a conversation with loss.

Family matters here in the unshowy way families actually do: not as tidy resolutions but as messy histories that shape a person’s choices. Ellie’s life is tethered to the past by inheritance and absence, and the film keeps returning to how those ties both protect and trap her.

Authority — how men in charge manipulate and exploit — is threaded through the visions of Sandie’s life. The glamorous past we admire on postcards is undercut by the reality of control and coercion, and those revelations complicate any romantic notion of freedom tied to an earlier era. Finally, the supernatural belief embedded in the story is less about proving ghosts exist and more about how belief can open doors. Whether the visions are literal hauntings or the mind doing its desperate work, they force Ellie to reckon with truth, justice and how much of the past we actually get to own.

Last Night in Soho arrived in 2021, and that timing matters because it’s a film that wears its decade honestly: a contemporary psychological thriller that uses nostalgia as a lens rather than as the destination.

As a 2020s movie, it sits comfortably in a moment when directors are willing to blend genre and personal feeling — a thriller that looks both backward and inward without pretending the past was kinder than it was.

Its release in 2021 also meant it arrived in a cultural moment keen on re-examining histories, asking whose stories we celebrate and at what cost. Framing those questions inside a stylish, spooky package felt of a piece with other films of the era.

That doesn’t mean it’s a period film pretending to be modern; it’s a modern film that uses the past to talk about now. The year of release is a clue to its sensibility: nostalgic, interrogative and unafraid to make the past uncomfortable.

Ellie’s basic situation— a young person uprooted, grieving and trying to find community at college — remains instantly relatable. The film trusts that emotional core, and that trust helps it hold up; you don’t need to be a mod to understand what loneliness feels like in a new city.

The contrast between the safety she seeks at home and the dangers she discovers in the past still lands. Themes around family and what makes a home are straightforward and human in a way that usually wears well: they’re not dependent on trends or throwback aesthetics.

Some scenes that trade on the glamour of the 1960s will read differently depending on what the viewer brings to them. But the narrative thread that shows Sandie moving from promise to exploitation — and how that intersects with Jack’s role — keeps the stakes immediate rather than archival.

In short: the emotional architecture of the story — grief, aspiration, and the risk of idolising eras you don’t actually live in — remains resonant. The film’s anxieties about safety and belonging are still recognisable now.

People remember the film because it pairs a plain, sympathetic lead with a seductive, dangerous other life. Ellie’s fascination with Sandie — the singer she watches in her visions — is the central relationship that gives the movie its push and pull.

The story’s reveals also stick. Ellie’s dreams begin as inspiration — she copies Sandie’s look, she designs a dress after one night’s vision — and slowly mutate into a mystery that forces her to act. That movement from fancy to confrontation is what viewers talk about afterwards.

There’s also the moral muddle: Ellie chases what she thinks is justice, confronts a man she believes responsible, and things go tragically wrong. The chain of events — the misunderstanding at the pub, the death in the street, the later revelation about the man’s true role — leaves audiences debating choices long after the credits. Finally, the film closes on a surprisingly tender note: after fire and loss and the impossible work of surviving, Ellie’s designs are shown and she sees signs of the people she loves in mirrors. That blend of horror and eventual recognition gives the movie an emotional footprint that lingers.

Yes — with a caveat. If you come for a glossy period fantasia you’ll find something darker than expected, which is the point: this is a psychological thriller that uses style to get at real emotional questions about grief and belonging.

Ellie’s journey from small-town student to someone forced to face violent truths still feels honest. The film gives her a real through-line — the dream that sparks a dress, the loyalty to her mother’s memory, the fragile safety offered by her grandmother — and that human centre keeps the genre machinery grounded.

There are rough edges in how some revelations play out, and the moral consequences of Ellie’s decisions are messy rather than neat. But that messiness is also where the film gains its teeth: it refuses a tidy revenge fantasy and asks the viewer to sit with discomfort.

So watch it. Watch it because it looks sumptuous and because it doesn’t let pretty things off the hook. It’s a film that invites you to admire the dress and then points out the stain on the hem.