Last Night In Soho (18, 116 mins)
Verdict:A nightmare from the Sixties
Rating: 
Quant (12A, 86 mins)
Verdict: A Sixties victory
Rating: 
Our vision is distorted by the rose-tinted glasses we use to romanticize the past. This is the message of Last Night In Soho by Edgar Wright, a wonderfully deft mix horror film and period thriller set in London in the present and the ‘Swinging Sixties.
Wright is best known for his comedy series, the ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ (Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz) He has since made a great action film, Baby Driver 2017, and is now a master of psychological terror. Last Night In Soho — which Wright wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns — exerts a fierce grip from the start and never lets go.
It also provides us with our last glimpse of Diana Rigg (who died at 82 just after filming was completed). It also includes parts for veterans Terence Stamp (83) and Rita Tushingham (79).
Innocents captured: Sandie, a talented nightclub singer, is snared by Matt Smith (a roguish charmer). Her dreams begin to come true when Smith gives her an audition
Sixties iconography is all over this movie, including the cast list and title (named after a 1968 single from Dozy, Beaky and Mick). It all begins in the present, in a Cornwall bedroom.
Eloise (the engaging New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie is making a decent fist with her West Country vowels) dances to A World Without Love by Peter and Gordon in 1964.
We can see that she is in love with the Sixties from a glance around the room. Her greatest wish is to live in London and study fashion, which she may one day emulate Mary Quant.
A letter arrives. Ellie was accepted to a Soho-based fashion college. Tushingham, her grandmother, is equally thrilled. However, she warns her: “London can be a lot.” This line — London can be a lot — might almost be the film’s subtitle.
Pictured: Eloise (the engaging New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie, pictured) has been accepted into a fashion college on the edge of Soho
It is repeated many times by different characters and may reflect the experiences of the director who grew up in Somerset’s sleepy Wells. It appears that London was too much to Ellie’s mother who died years ago by her own hands. While a strong part of Ellie’s motivation is to make her dead mother proud, her gran was right — London can be a lot.
She is a lecherous cab driver and her first taste in city life. Her country mouse ways are soon mocked when she moves into a residence hall by her fellow students, including her entitled, spiteful roommate Jocasta.
So unworldly, Ellie escapes to a nearby house of Miss Collins (Rigg), who calls Ellie ‘dearie’ and seems like an even better choice than Jocasta.
Ellie dreams vividly about the Sixties that night. She is taken to Cafe de Paris where Cilla Black is performing cabaret.
It turned out that Soho didn’t swing in the Sixties, it suppurated. Sexual predators weren’t hidden in the shadows. They were out there. The threat of violence shimmered through the ever-present fug of cigarettes.
There, she acquires a kind of alter ego — an aspiring nightclub singer called Sandie (the superb Anya Taylor-Joy), whose own dreams start coming true when a roguish charmer (Matt Smith) gets her an audition. Sandie is on her path.
These visions are inspiring Ellie to create retro-inspired dresses back in the real world. Sandie is also on her way up. She is offered a job as a bartender with a sympathetic landlady.
John (Michael Ajao), a classmate, clearly loves her rotten. He looks like Mr Right. Perhaps this isn’t a world that is without love after all. The other Mr Wright, however, has a series shocks in store for her as well as for us.
It turned out that Soho didn’t swing in the Sixties, it suppurated. Sexual predators weren’t hidden in the shadows. They were out there. The threat of violence shimmered through the ever-present fug of cigarettes.
Sandie isn’t going up, she’s going down. Ellie’s life becomes a nightmare as well, as hers. She is haunted by Sandie who, she believes, lived in the house she is renting.
Visions of a long-ago killing, to which Stamp appears to have the key, led her to the police. She is told that London can be very expensive, just like her grandma.
This captivating film is also a lot. The ending is perhaps a little overwrought, with Wright reaching for horror movie tropes a bit too enthusiastically, but it is ingeniously managed from start very nearly to finish — with a Sixties soundtrack, and let me choose my words carefully, to die for.
If the cinematic double-bill was still possible, Last Night In Soho could be paired up quite inventively with Quant. Sadie Frost’s entertaining documentary about the pioneering fashion design who, as a schoolgirl used to pull her skirt up to run for the bus and later turned that experience into her most famous blueprint.
I was a Paris hotel concierge in the 80s and had to buy a hairdryer once for Quant. He tipped me generously. It was my biggest claim of fame at the time.
Hers, more seismically were the mini skirt, and a hugely successful make-up line she created when she realized that ‘Fifties face didn’t match Sixties life’.
Last Night in Soho might suggest that women back in those days weren’t as free as we would like to believe, but Mary Quant did more than anyone to make them feel free.
ALSO SHOWING… Deceit and desire in Jazz Age New York
Long before it was a film, Passing (★★★✩✩ 12A, 98 mins) was a novel. Nella Larsen, a mixed race woman, wrote it in 1929. She was intrigued by the issues of racial or sexual identity.
Here’s the film. It was shot in black-and-white and is Rebecca Hall’s debut feature. Her late father, Sir Peter Hall knew a lot about directing.
It’s slow and intoxicating. There is a lot of stagey dialogue. It’s very pleasing on both the eye and the ear once you get used too.
Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson are both amazing as Irene (pictured), childhood friends who meet accidentally a decade later at Jazz Age New York.
Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, and Irene are both amazing as Clare, childhood best friends who happen to meet a decade later in Jazz Age New York.
Both women are mixed-race, but Irene lives and works in Harlem as an African woman, married to a black physician, while Clare pretends to be white and is married unreconstructed racist John (Alexander Skarsgard).
Irene’s statement that “All of us are passing for something or the other” is perhaps the most important line as their sexual desire starts to flicker in their rekindled friendship. It doesn’t matter what color we are or what society, we can all agree with that.
Antlers (★★✩✩✩, 15, 99 mins), directed by Scott Cooper and produced by Guillermo del Toro, is also about people who are not what they seem. It’s a slow-paced horror film that uses metaphors about abuses and racism. It is set in small-town Oregon.
Keri Russell plays his sister Keri Russell, and Jesse Plemons is the sheriff. Keri Russell is a teacher who believes that a vulnerable student of hers has a supernatural secret.
Young Jeremy T. Thomas is the one who steals the show. But it’s not worth stealing.
Both films are currently in cinemas. Passing will also be available for streaming on Netflix beginning November 10.