A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

The first Iranian Vampire Western

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Release Date: Jan 19, 2014
Rated: N/A | Runtime: 99 Mins | Language: Persian
Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Stars: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains, Rome Shadanloo, Masuka

Summary

In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire.

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A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) - Video review
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) Movie Review | Sweet N' Spooky

What to Expect

This black and white genre-bender – a noir-ish, pulpy spaghetti-western fairy-tale romance– packs a wallop. Spoken in Farsi with subtitles, the film is set in “Bad City, Iran,” but it was filmed in Taft, California, with donkey pumpers chugging away everywhere. It is skillfully overlaid with a compelling soundtrack featuring bands like White Lies and Radio Tehran.

Everyone here is a consumer, by theft, toil, trade, or, in the case of vampires and lovers, by taste.. The oil wells pump stuff from the ground. The junkies pump junk into themselves. The johns feed off the prostitutes. The girl drinks from her victims.

From the opening scene lazily unfolding behind the title cards, a young man (Arash, we later learn) smokes in sunglasses and a Read more...

From the opening scene lazily unfolding behind the title cards, a young man (Arash, we later learn) smokes in sunglasses and a crisp t-shirt. He’s cool, but he’s up to something. He slips in behind a fenced area, then reappears with a cat drooped over his arm and strides away.

Did he just steal a pet? Or was that his cat? The questions might be trivial, but the answers are intentionally withheld, and the viewer leans into the screen, hooked.

Director Amirpour, in an interview with Roger Corman, described the first time when she tried on a chador: “For me, when I put it on, I felt very bad-ass. It has a weight and it moves a certain way and I just felt like a stingray and I wanted to be on a skateboard.” It was this moment that she first conceived the film and the girl vampire walking home alone at night.

The wordy film title suggests the vignette of a victim; a girl walking home (unprotected) alone and at night. But like the inversion of the chador – for some, a symbol of oppression – into a superhero cape, at least in Amirpour’s experience, the film also transposes other expectations. The girl who walks home alone at night is, in fact, the aggressor, and a very bad-ass vampire indeed, hidden within the flowing movement of her chador.

This is a delightful, mesmerizing debut. Amirpour is a bad-ass director (she was purportedly a stand-in for the film’s skateboarding sequences). Her first film deserves close attention and repeated viewings.

In Farsi, one might say, Chashm. You should emphatically watch this film.

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Critic Reviews:

Amirpour trumps story grievances with controlled and sustained direction, shifting gears from frightening vampirisms and Western bravado like it's no big thing. A Girl Walks Home at Night evokes an underground comic book, black ink realizing fringe characters and splashy frames both intimate and wide. There's little indie roughness around the edges of this low-budget genre experiment, any well-tread tropes given new life from the Iranian settings. A Girl Walks Home at Night takes its cues from film of yore, but in Amirpour's hands it's something brand new.

– IGN

Amirpour lets the images do all of the work for her, a huge strength of the film. The image of a female vampire skateboarding down a street, her voluminous veil flying out behind her, does the job with more poetic satisfaction and truth than any explicit monologue about the repression of women could ever do. [...] Essentially, "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" is a film about film, a fresh and exciting re-imagining of a well-worn oft-told genre.

– Roger Ebert

Amirpour’s vampire is not tormented by the agony of living for ever. She knows what she wants and is not unduly troubled by the existential crisis of immortality; neither is she the heroic underdog of Let the Right One In (2008). This vampire victimises and bullies a small child for his skateboard, terrifyingly hissing in his ear: “To the end of your life, I’ll watch you …” It’s a film with bite.

– The Guardian