A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Official trailer

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night deserves its 7.5 as the strongest debut the vampire genre has produced this century and among the coolest films on this list. Ana Lily Amirpour made it as her first feature, a black-and-white Iranian vampire Western shot in California, spoken in Farsi, scored with Iranian pop and post-punk, and built around a vampire in a chador who skateboards through an oil-derrick ghost town preying on men who deserve it.

The description alone tells you whether you want to see it. The film delivers completely on its style and only partly on everything else.

I fell for the look of this film almost immediately and spent the rest of it wishing the story would catch up. That gap is the whole 7.5 for me. The images are so confident that I kept forgiving the drift, and by the end my patience was wearing thin.

This is a mood and image film more than a story film, and on those terms it’s a knockout.

Amirpour has a visual sensibility fully formed on her first try, and the film is a sustained act of atmosphere. What it lacks is much narrative drive. That keeps a great-looking film from being a great one.

The Image of the Girl

The film’s central creation is its vampire, a young woman known only as the Girl, who haunts the fictional Iranian town of Bad City wrapped in a black chador that functions exactly like a vampire’s cape, billowing behind her as she stalks the streets at night. Sheila Vand plays her with a watchful, silent stillness, an outsider observing a town full of predators and deciding who deserves what she does.

The chador is the film’s masterstroke of design, and I think it’s the best vampire costume idea in decades. It turns a garment loaded with cultural meaning into something uncanny and threatening. When the Girl follows a man down a deserted street, gliding behind him in black, the image is pure dread, and it carries political and feminist charge without a word of explanation. She preys mostly on men who abuse women, and I was on her side every time.

Style as the Main Event

Amirpour shoots in luminous black and white, and the film looks like a collision of Iranian New Wave, spaghetti Western, and music video. Bad City is a dreamlike nowhere of empty streets, looming oil derricks, and a drainage ditch where bodies pile up. The film is full of indelible images, the Girl skateboarding through empty streets, a slow dance in a bedroom lit by a glitter ball, a cat watching everything.

The soundtrack matters as much as the visuals, a mix of Iranian pop, spaghetti-Western guitar and post-punk that gives the film its hypnotic rhythm. The bedroom scene, where the Girl and the male lead stand in near stillness for minutes while a song plays, is the scene I’d rate the whole film on. It’s romantic and tense at once, built from nothing but atmosphere, music and the threat of what she might do.

Amirpour’s film treats style as the main event, and unlike The Hunger, it mostly earns it, because Amirpour’s images carry feeling and meaning instead of just gloss. The coolness is doing thematic work, evoking alienation, desire, and danger. But the film leans so hard on mood that the thinness of its story eventually shows.

The Romance and the Thin Plot

The film’s slender story centers on the tentative romance between the Girl and Arash, a young man in a James Dean white T-shirt struggling to care for his heroin-addicted father and trapped by the town’s small-time criminals. Their connection is the film’s emotional core, two lonely outsiders drawn together, one of them a predator who chooses not to prey on the other.

The tension is real. We know what the Girl is and what she does. Every scene between them carries the question of whether she’ll turn on him. But the film doesn’t develop the relationship much beyond mood and longing, and the supporting plot about the local pimp and Arash’s father is sketchy, more a set of situations than a story. The film drifts where it should build, content to evoke instead of develop.

That’s the price of Amirpour’s priorities. She’s a visual stylist first, and the story serves the images. I can surrender to a mood as well as anybody, and even so the subplot about the pimp and Arash’s father lost me.

I kept waiting for the relationship between the Girl and Arash to go somewhere, and it mostly hovers. That’s where the film costs itself a point or two.

Is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night worth watching?

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night deserves its 7.5 as a standout debut and a distinctive vampire film. Amirpour’s black-and-white Iranian vampire Western has a fully formed visual sensibility, an unforgettable central image in the chador-caped Girl, a perfect soundtrack, and real political and feminist charge beneath its cool surface. It loses points for a thin, drifting plot and an underdeveloped central romance that leans on mood where it should build story.

The 7.5 is me splitting the difference between a first feature this sure of its own eye and a story too thin to hold my attention the whole way. I’d watch the Girl skateboard down that empty street on a loop, and I wish Amirpour had given her more to do once she got where she was going.

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