Dashed dreams and grubby hands reveal themselves to be the stuff of Edgar Wright’s nightmares in the stylish throwback Last Night in Soho. A ghostly haunter with one foot in the modern zeitgeist and one squarely in raging 1960’s London, Wright’s first foray into the horror grapples between serious social horrors and pure genre thrills, delivering a thoroughly entertaining slice of Giallo exploitation that warns of the temptation of nostalgia.

Last Night in Soho isn’t exactly the kind of “elevated horror” that has been popularized by artists like Ari Aster, Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers. At is core, it’s much more silly than that, despite clearly having a lot to say and saying it quite directly. As his films always do, this movie has style to spare – the costumes! the set design! the music! the cinematography! – but that style is in service of a fairly straight forward murder mystery. But with time travel. Kind of.

Thomasin McKenzie is Eloise, a promising modern-day fashion student who struggles with her mental health. Ever since her mom – also a fashion design – killed herself, she’s seen her ghost; a benevolent – if unsettling – presence, but an apparition nonetheless. When McKenzie leaves small town life behind for big city livin’ at her design college in North London, she finds herself lost in the fray, unable to ameliorate herself to her status-chasing roomie Jacosta (Synnove Karlsen) and out of step with most of her peers.

Eloise is much more comfortable disappearing into her fantasies, popping on her Beats headphones and sinking into the soothing psych-jams of The Kinks or the aspirational ballads of Petula Clark. When Eloise opts to remove herself from her distressing housing situation, she finds a room more suiting to her tastes, bunking up with the elderly Miss Collins (Diana Rigg in her final role). In doing so, she’s transported into a dream world when reality and fantasy blend and intersect, stepping back through time to mysteriously enter the 1960’s where she encounters Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), a glamorous aspiring starlet who dreams – nay demands – to headline across the hottest spots in North London. She’ll do anything to get where she wants and Eloise can’t wait to watch her success unfold.

Becoming increasingly wrapped up in the past, the meek Eloise rushes to escape her own disappointing reality to time-jump into these fantasies. There, she and Sandy maybe share a body – or a consciousness – though the logistics remain somewhat unclear. Not that it really matters. Eloise is happy to live vicariously, trapped in a mirror world, an effect that’s achieved visually with a whole load of in-camera technical sorcery by the always-clever Wright.

Sedated by the glitz of nostalgia and a budding romance with charismatic “manager” Jack (Matt Smith), Eloise swoons. Dreams quickly go pear-shaped as Eloise and Sandy find themselves trapped instead in a waking nightmare, their fantasies overruled by the sexual appetites of “men in charge”. Sandy’s aspirations are weaponized against her. Her talents reduced to a pound of flesh. Her roar whittled down to a mew. It’s hard gulp stuff and Wright translates the horrors capably.

While Last Night in Soho may not render jolting terror or functionally scary sequences, Wright finds plenty of moments that are genuinely chilling, particularly as corrals of men push themselves into and onto Sandy/Eloise. One scene in particular, with a repeating refrain of “What a pretty name” proves dizzying to the point of becoming sickening. Wright leans into the psychedelic nature of the horror here, playing with intense lighting and woozy sound design to bring the viewer into their own state of helplessness and surrender.

It’s not all so successful as the whole of the picture is a bit long in the tooth at nearly two hours. Additionally, there are some red herrings that don’t add much overall, there just to throw viewer’s off the scent. But the pluses handily outweighs any detractors, particularly the cast as led by McKenzie and Taylor-Joy and the near limitless elegance of Wright’s filmmaking. The dude just knows how to frame a scene and surround said scene with all kinds of glitz and glam so that even when the plot feels somewhat sketchy and derivative, it’s elevated by the pure dazzle of it all. Much like flies buzzing towards the blinding lights of the big city or a wannabe starlet seduced by half-lies and shady promise, this viewer proved helpless to resist Wright’s multitudinous temptations.

CONCLUSION: Edgar Wright’s flirtation with horror results in a psychedelic, feminist thriller told with great élan. Enthusiastically stylish, ‘Last Night in Soho’ boasts a strong female cast and a chilling deconstruction of the hefty prices paid by the aspiring many who don’t “make it”.