Rick Romancito

Complex characters and subject matter that takes a scalpel to a variety of issues facing families today makes this a must watch limited series.

The acclaimed British director Edgar Wright is known for stylish editing and for taking the plot and visuals of a film into an ever-expanding metaverse peppered with sly pop culture references and barely subliminal symbolism. See the highly imaginative “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” to get what we mean. For his latest, “Last Night in Soho,” he takes us down stylish pathways that are at once familiar and somewhat comfortable before upending the firmament into a breathtaking hallucinatory display meant to ask what’s really going on here. And, right at the point where the audience might be ready to bail on what appears to be cinematic self indulgence he drops in little clues that he knows exactly what he’s doing and beckons to stay along for the ride. The film opens on a young woman, named Eloise “Ellie” Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) — sheltered all her life in a bucolic rural English village where she lives with her grandmother (Rita Tushingham) and makes her own clothes while digging the style and music of 1960s Carnaby Street — who realizes a dream come true. She has been accepted to a prestigious design school. So, bidding gram goodbye, Ellie heads off to meet her destiny, innocent and wide-eyed. Up until she arrives, Wright cleverly makes us wonder if we really are in the 60s. But, of course, we see this is the present as Ellie makes her way to the school where she discovers in the dorm a breeding ground for Mean Girls among her fellow classmates, except for a nice boy, John (Michael Ajao). But, the parties and drinking and cattiness, gets to be too much for Ellie who decides to find a small apartment nearby. She finds it in a building whose landlady is a Ms. Collins (Diana Rigg. Yes, that Diana Rigg). Ellie loves it immediately and takes it. Before long, however, Ellie finds herself living a strange dreamlike state while asleep. In it, she embodies a mysterious young woman named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) who appears to be someone living in the 1960s. She is beautiful, glamorous, and immediately catches the eye of every man she meets, especially one named Jack (Matt Smith) who auditions her as a singer at a nearby club. Wright’s sense for the sensuality of the era punctuated by delicious pop songs makes this part especially vivid. And, because it seems like a psychedelic trip enveloped in a surreal idea of the times, we wonder whose dream this really is. If it’s Ellie’s, this could be ominous since we learn early on that her dad is absent and her mom was emotionally unstable and eventually took her own life. Is this what’s happening? When Ellie begins to suspect there’s something else after delving into Soho’s history. Wright’s evocation of the 60s is imaginative because it makes it seem so tangible and exciting, even though we know it’s a fantasy. And, because he casts icons of the period, Tushingham, Terence Stamp and Rigg (whose last film this was before passing away September 10, 2020), the grasp is even more firm. The only quibble about “Last Night in Soho” is that Wright spends the last third of the film bringing all the disparate elements together into a cohesive whole. That might be the saving grace of any experimentalist independent film, but here it feels a little like some great ideas were squandered in favor of conventional clarity. Still, it’s quite a ride.