Review: 'Last Night in Soho' squanders a smashing premise

The set-up of “Last Night in Soho” is smashing but gets squandered by the film’s second half, which takes a promising premise and drives it into a muddled murder mystery that stretches the supernatural concept too far to bear

Who knew that digging the Kinks could be so dangerous?

“The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” (an album good enough to die for, truth be told) is one of the records that Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) stuffs into her suitcase when she gleefully packs for London. Eloise has long fantasized about living in the city, a dream built on the allure of London's 1960s swinging past. Her grandmother (Rita Tushingham), who raised her and supplied the piles of vinyl, watches Eloise's great expectations with trepidation. Eloise's mother embarked on a similar path, but years earlier killed herself.

“It's not what you imagine, London,” she says.

In Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho,” it doesn't take long for the modern-day London to disabuse Eloise of her romantic notions. The city's seedy underbelly she senses on her first cab ride. She arrives a naive fashion student, mocked by her classmates for her old-fashioned tastes. Eloise flees to a quiet apartment of her own, atop an old building in Soho, owned by an elderly landlady (the late Diana Rigg, in her final screen performance). There, she is magically transported to ‘60s London whenever she falls asleep and a bedside record player turns on. In her nighttime trips, she mirrors an aspiring chanteuse Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, soaking up the period style) on a glamorous romp through the heady era. But with time, her vicarious experience of the ’60s turns dark. Not all was so swinging, it turns out, particularly for a beautiful young woman trying to make her way in nightclubs full of leering men.