MOVIE NEWS – Things used to be better, we often sigh, but this nostalgia is seductively false: things were not good then. They are worse now. This could be the motto of Edgar Wright’s (Dawn of the Dead, Doomsday, Scott Pilgrim Against the World, Baby Driver) new film The Last Night In Soho, which takes us back to London in the happy memories of the 60s and the Soho.

Of course, it does so with a twist: the story’s modern heroine, a fan of 1960s London, is given supernatural powers that allow her to be a participant in the life of the former Soho, where the mainstream and counterculture of the era is as vibrant as the crime. The Last Night In Soho plot shifts back and forth between past and present as the solution to a decades-old mystery slowly unfolds.

“We talk too much about the good old days, especially when it comes to politics, and especially about the ’60s, thinking how perfect everything was then, how nothing bad happened,” The Hollywood Reporter quotes the director, who was born in 1974. – And yet the dark side of the sixties is well documented in a plethora of literature, film and plays, but only those who want to pay attention to it directly will notice. There’s also a strange thing: the further we get away from a decade, the more we tend to adorn it with romantic garlands, even the dark stuff… and I think that’s dangerous.”

The Last Night in Soho‘s female lead, Thomasin Mckenzie, whose character dives headlong into the darkest depths of the 1960s, sums up her take on the story: “It was during the filming that I realised that there was no point in living in the past all the time and that I shouldn’t overlook all the bad things that had happened.”

As Last Night in Soho is a stark portrayal of the brutal misogynist attitudes and sexual exploitation of women of the era, it was described after its world premiere in Venice as “taking the message of the #metoo movement into the 60s”.

(Last Night at the Soho – domestic premiere: 4 November 2021.)

Source: UIP Dunafilm