A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Marketed as the first Iranian vampire movie, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a spooky, intelligent, and sexually charged piece of minimalism from LA-based indie filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour. Though the film is set in a fictional Iranian ghost town and its characters all speak Persian, A Girl Walks Home… feels less like a work of the Iranian new wave and more like an early Jim Jarmusch picture (it’s ironic that this same year saw the release of Jarmusch’s own take on the vampire genre—the inferior Only Lovers Left Alive). Amirpour shoots her movie in high contrast black and white and holds her wide, often static, never hand-held shots far longer than most audiences might expect. But these attributes aren’t what remind us of Jarmusch as much as the cool, hip, tight-lipped quality of the characters—not to mention their taste in music. The film is also reminiscent of the wave of black and white indie pictures about vampires released in the ‘90s, like Michael Almereyda’s Nadja and Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, but Amirpour’s début feature easily trumps those movies because her film lacks pretentiousness and gimmickry. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is as straightforward as it’s title.

Sheila Vand stars as a lonely girl who stalks the vacant streets of “Bad City” on a skateboard, dressed casually in a chador. The images of this diminutive figure floating along the sidewalks or staring motionless at potential victims from across the streets in her black cape are arresting. But Amirpour does far more than fuse Victorian era gothic iconography with contemporary Islamic trappings. The film presents a subtle meditation on Iran’s decaying patriarchal culture. The central characters are young, Westernized twentysomethings eager to escape the rotting structures of the decrepit, ill, and morally compromised older generation. Vand (a performance artist who starred in Broadway’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, and had a small part in Ben Affleck's Argo) conveys a great deal through her large eyes and understated movements. Arash Marandi is equally engaging as the gentle, nurturing boy she takes up with, and Dominic Rains infuses the film with welcome energy as the local drug-dealer.

The movie never pretends to be anything more than an eclectic, hipster sampling of film styles, pop music, and vintage culture; but it does occasionally feel overly indulgent and sluggish. There’s plenty of substance to this stylish ride, though by the time the story reaches its third act you’ll wish Amirpour had another layer of subtext to peel back and surprise you with. I never thought I’d want to sit through another modern vampire movie, but this young filmmaker has proved that there’s always fresh life to be found in this seemingly dead genre.