Last Night in Soho serves as a worthy nostalgia piece, but also warns against perils of living in the past

Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho uses the tropes and elements of a horror film to present a cautionary tale to those like me who treat nostalgia as a place of great allure and comfort. “The past is a foreign country,” goes the famous opening of LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, “They do things differently there.” These lines could serve as a very generalised epigraph for Edgar Wright’ s new film Last Night in Soho, though the following might be more suitable: The past is a monster that pretends to be your security blanket, providing warmth and reassurance, but then smothers you in its labyrinthine folds. Though Last Night in Soho is broadly speaking psychological horror, it has kindred spirits in other genres – in Woody Allen’s delightful Midnight in Paris, for instance, where an American writer visiting Paris finds himself back in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with Salvador Dali and Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald. Both were an important part of the British pop-cultural landscape of the swinging ’60s: Rigg became a star in that decade with her iconic role as Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers, and by playing arguably the first “Bond girl” of real substance, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Stamp, though best known to my generation for playing Superman’s arch-enemy General Zod, was genuinely sinister in the ’60s in such films as The Collector and Spirits of the Dead.