A Girl Walk Home Alone At Night

We’ve had sparkly vampires and we’ve had funny vampires.  We’ve even had whatever it was Johnny Depp was doing in Dark Shadows.  However, it is safe to say A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is our first Iranian Western vampire.

It is also the first film from writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour, who is of Iranian-American descent.  I’d also put money on it probably not being her last, as what she has created here is a stylish film which takes influence from everything from Sergio Leone to pop music.

Set in the fictional Bad City, a place where bodies rot in ditches at the side of the road, a more traditional Western would have seen a lone gunman on a horse ride in and save the day.  Instead we have a young female vampire on a skateboard, who roams the streets at night, feeding on those who incur her displeasure.  Played by Sheila Vand she is never named and is a figure shrouded in mystery.  On one hand she is vengeance, leaping on victims to bite at their throats.  On the other she is a teenage girl, hiding in her room listening to pop music.

The teenage girl side of her personality comes out more when she meets Arash (Arash Marandi), a local boy who struggles to deal with a drug addict father and has worked hard to save up and buy himself a convertible.  Falling for each other they begin an improbably romance, which includes such dizzy heights as eating cheeseburgers outside a power plant.

Filmed entirely in black and white, the film has a style that is both haunting and beautiful.  The aforementioned bodies rotting at the side of the road are made all the more unsettling by the monochrome colour scheme, while it allows the vampire to blend into the background as she travels the streets dressed in a chador.  However, as her and Arash share their first moment of intimacy to the backing of White Lies, it creates a beauty to the proceedings.  A minimalist feeling as their two bodies get closer, not touching but straining towards each other with need.

Yet this is not a film for the impatient.  It is quite happy to float along at its own pace, never speeding up and at times stopping entirely.  Plot is drip fed to you and if you are unable to lose yourself in this world it would be easy to drift away and ultimately find yourself bored by the whole thing.  If your willing to go along with it however, you will find a world drenched in pop culture and brimming with symbolism for you to delve into and unravel

That pop culture comes out the most within the soundtrack.  The already mentioned White Lies belies the indie sensibility that is running through this film.  However, the Western theme is there as well and there are moments of music that bring to mind the Spaghetti Westerns that it so strangely imitates.  It’s a beautiful score and in many ways does enough to make the film worth it for that alone.

It’s an impossible fact to deny, for some A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night will be pretentious twaddle.  Slow and up its own arse.  However, if pretentious twaddle is actually your wheelhouse, you will find so much in this film.  It’s stylish and cool and just oozing with a class that comes from a director that even first time around already seems to know exactly what they want to do.  Much like Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive this makes vampires seem cool and edgy once again and is a triumph of film making.