Before you even get to the story, its setting or its heroine – before you see the film at all – writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is already running chilly fingers up your spine. It’s the film’s title. Anyone with the slightest awareness of the world knows that a girl walking home alone at night, no matter who she is or where home might be, is a setup ripe for any number of nightmarish outcomes. Amirpour works from the knowledge of your knowledge (about the world, about horror film genre tropes) and subverts expectation, rewiring horror film template into a springboard for droll sociopolitical commentary.
Released in theaters last fall and now available on VOD, A Girl Walks Home earns a place alongside Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive as art-house vampire flicks that brilliantly re-imagine the possibilities of vampire lore.
Set in Iran, in the fictional Bad City, Girl has an otherworldly feel largely due to its meticulously composed and shot B&W imagery, but also due to the desolateness of Bakersfield, CA (where the film was actually shot) and the slippage between where the film was shot and the place it’s meant to represent. The film draws on a host of genres and cultural influences/references (the soundtrack alone showcases the Middle Eastern fusion beats of Bei Ru, underground Iranian rock bands Radio Tehran and Kiosk, and the spaghetti western-inspired tunes of Portland-based Federale.) Moving at a measured pace that becomes hypnotic, it feels both out of place and out of time, which magnifies its evocativeness.
The heroine, simply called The Girl (Sheila Vand) is a doe-eyed, skateboarding, hijab wearing young woman who happens to be a vampire. As with many contemporary vampires, she has a strict moral compass that determines who she feeds on and who she protects. She’s also excruciatingly lonely. So is Arash (Arash Mandi,) whose garb of white t-shirt, faded jeans, dark boots and dark sunglasses conjures ‘50s American male cool. He works as a gardener for a wealthy family to support himself and his heroin & whores addicted father (Marshall Manesh), whose indebtedness to a gaudy drug dealer/pimp (a scene stealing Dominic Rains) is the catalyst for a series of acts that bring Arash and The Girl together. Fleshing out this cast of misfits and margin dwellers is an aging prostitute, a homeless beggar boy, and a cross-dressing gay male.
The film’s championing of the underdog, its allegiance to a morality that sees comeuppance doled out to bullies while also acknowledging that justice is often elusive for the bullied, gains considerable power for being set in Iran, but also gives it a universal appeal. That appeal is boosted by strong performances across the board. Vand’s wide eyes are expressive and inscrutable at once, reminding you of a silent film actress at peak powers; Arash serves up James Dean-style existential angst; Rains’ EMD listening, coke snorting, tackily tattooed pimp is repugnant and magnetic at once. That the film, in the end, turns into a prickly romance is not a shortcoming, but a commentary on the vagaries of love in a world whose fuckery seeps into every aspect of our lives. This is masterful filmmaking.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
