Last Night in Soho * * * ½

A pretty young girl with mental health problems and obsession of sixties music and fashion also has aspirations of becoming a fashion designer.  She is accepted by a leading fashion college in London.

After a crap time with bitchy girls in the students quarters at the college, Eloise rents a room which has many dark secrets.  It's on the top floor of a house owned by an old woman who is a bit of an odd ball (Diana Rigg).

Eloise has the ability to either time-shift or dream herself into an imaginary world. I'm not sure which, but it happens. Basically when she goes to sleep she finds herself in London in the swinging sixties.  Not only that, but she also finds she has become another person.  A young lass with aspirations of being a singer. 

Eloise and Sandy in the sixties: Weird hair,
good music - and selling your body. 

Eloise cannot control what is happening in this dream world she enters, which is unfortunate, as bad things start to happen to her - or the alter-ego she becomes - it depends on which way you look at it.  

Her 1960's alter ego Sandy, (played by the formidable Anya Taylor-Joy) soon finds herself being exploited by a corrupt manager who is actually nothing more than a pimp.

For the first hour or so I thought it was brilliantly done with the convincing way she slips in and out of this other world and the way in which the characters from that world start to break into her "real life".  In the second half it gets all too complicated for it's own good, with the crazy old lady explaining away this, that and the other thing, along with what we suspected all along. The final scenes are just silly, even though it's classified as "horror".

It also has a moral stance that left me scratching my head.  Sandy is a young woman so full of herself and her desire to be a "star" she is willing to do anything to get there so she becomes a hooker but hates her clientele as well as herself  Really, I had to wonder, were the men who paid to sleep with her any less moral than her selfish obsession about being famous and worshipped?

The film is by Edgar Wright who also gave us Baby Driver.  Like that film the music is a knock out.  It's nearly all from the sixties, with the Graham Bond Organisation getting a particularly good airing.