Movie Review: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

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Being billed as “The First Iranian Vampire Western” as well as the feature debut of Ana Lily Amirpour, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is certainly one of the most intriguing and unique films I’ve seen in a long time.

The film concerns the denizens of the fictional Iranian town of Bad City, an awful town where oil refineries and power plants are more bountiful than homes, and dead bodies pile up in a dried up river. There’s Arash a young man involved with violent drug dealer Saeed who looks like someone straight out of Harmony Korine’s imagination, and has to take care of his junkie father Hossein. There’s also party girl Shaydah and aging prostitute Atti, all of whom are unwitting targets of a new arrival in town: A Vampire, the nameless girl from the film’s title.

Our vampire protagonist is certainly one we’ve never seen before. She’s a young Muslim girl with a taste for blood and poppy dance music. The first time we see her cruising for blood at night on a skateboard, hijab flowing in the wind, we realize now there are no rules in this world. Indeed, it does seem like underneath the veneer of this sleek vampire movie, Amirpour is making a statement about Western influence on Middle Eastern culture. The characters do very American things, things that most westerners would assume Middle Easterners wouldn’t do. Things like go to raves, do recreational drugs, have lots of sex, and listen to dance music.

The film takes its time setting up it’s deliberate pacing, but when the vampire bares her fangs for the first time, the movie really starts to get exciting. The black and white photography is excellent. The mood of the visuals goes back and forth between being lush and hallucinatory to dark and moody. Many of the more sinister shots evoke David Lynch and the machinery sounds of Bad City definitely feel like it could be the sister city to the nameless hellish nowhere town of Eraserhead. There are also tinges of Spaghetti Western and gangster genres, and the characters seem pretty savvy too, listening to Western music and having their walls adorned with Michael Jackson posters. The film feels like a mixing pot of all sorts of outside influences, through the lens of an Iranian female director and the resulting dish is quite tasty. In time, the film will be assuredly be accepted as part of the canon of revisionist vampire flicks that include Let The Right One In and Only Lovers Left Alive.