A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night **** (2014, Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains) – Movie Review

Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour‘s ultra-confident, uber-astonishing feature debut vampire movie (based on her 2011 short film) is hardly a vampire movie at all. It’s a teasing, genre-bending romantic horror thriller, with no real horror or gore, unfortunately. It’s in glorious black and white – there’s no red blood! Oh for some spot colour!

What it is, is a style object indie movie, harking back to the glory days of Jim Jarmusch, whose style it appropriates, and the days of the Clint Eastwood Western (I kid you not) of High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider. I know all this because it is billed as ‘The first Iranian Vampire Western’.

It’s totally eye-popping. Every image could be framed and be stuck on an art gallery, or photographer’s gallery, wall. That could get annoying, what with not treating the vampire story seriously, but it doesn’t. It just gets more and more gob-smackingly impressive. The movie doesn’t have anything like enough actual plot to fill its 101 minutes so it dazzles us with its visual style, romantic mood and brilliant soundtrack.

Sheila Vand is quietly astounding as The Girl, Arash Marandi plays the boy she likes the look of, while Marshall Manesh and Dominic Rains are suitably unpleasant in showy turns as Hossein ‘The Junkie’ and Saeed ‘The Pimp’.

The Girl may be a skateboarding Iranian vampire, but she also may be The Girl With No Name, the mysterious stranger, or spirit force, who is going to change the barren, inhospitable landscape with a moral stance that’s as lethal as it is certain. The Girl also weirdly recalls Hannibal Lecter, and his odd moral dimension in killing off the universe’s tasteless scum. You’d think the title would be describing the film’s prey or victim, but here it’s the predator.

Though it’s not going for genre action and thrills – it’s an art movie! – the film is plenty creepy and eerie, as a vampire film should be, must be.

It’s set in the Iranian ghost-town Bad City but filmed in Bakersfield and Taft in California. Two locomotives from the California area are seen at the power plant after The Girl gets her ears pierced.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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