A girl
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night blends vampire romance with surreal industrial horror
It takes a good amount of originality and expertise to tell a vampire story in a post-Twilight world. Vampires are everywhere, yet as a culture, we’re still interested by these terribly beautiful creatures who prowl the dark streets and prey on innocents. Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (it played at the Sundance Film Festival last year but is now available on Netflix) doesn’t stray too far from the standard vampire tropes, but manages to be a unique and atmospheric tale by making everything else about the story intriguingly different.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes place in a fictional Iranian locale – Bad City. It’s a dreary, black-and-white place of drug addicts, gutters for the disposal of corpses, empty shadowy streets and a bleak surrounding landscape filled only with the mechanized repetition of oil drills pumping endlessly amidst the smoke. It makes for a dismal world, but the film injects Bad City with the weird sense that everything also takes place in 1950s America (the outfits, cars, and hairstyles) and with the vibrancy of its two main characters — our young hero Arash (Arash Marandi, Kunduz: The Incident at Hadji Ghafur) and the vampire, known only in the credits as The Girl (Sheila Vand, Argo).
Arash’s story is surprisingly conventional given the strangeness of his surrounding world. He’s a handsome James Dean look-alike, struggling to survive and working a difficult job at the home of a wealthy family in order to buy a nice car and care for his demented and drug-addicted father. His struggles to care for his family pull him into danger when his father’s drug dealer takes Arash’s hard-earned car as payment for his father’s “medicine”. Through a series of surreal yet often touching close calls, he falls for The Girl and ends up involving her in his own criminal story.
Arash might be the emotional heart of the story, but the element that gives it its most interesting shades is The Girl. Vampires of the magical fantasy variety might be more or less similar to normal people, but you’ve never seen a vampire like this. The Girl is a young Iranian woman wearing a striped sailor shirt, bright lipstick (though often the reddish smear around her mouth definitely isn’t makeup) and a chador who spends her nights rolling around the streets on a skateboard or listening to records in her basement apartment. All this to say, she’s not a quirky Manic Pixie Dream Girl who just happens to be undead — she’s a real vampire, portrayed by Vand as somewhat of an alien, not exactly sure how to approximate real humor behavior. One scene in particular has her demonstrate the full range of her vampiric powers, in which her voice deepens to a horrific low while she rasps out all the terrible things of which she’s capable. She evokes the feeling that not only could she tear the heart from her victim’s chest, but that she’s done it before.
The film’s atmosphere remains its strongest point, but it’s not without flaws. It’s hard not to think that a lesser focus on the rather conventional plot might improve it – in other words, Bad City could stand to be a bit more bad, and a bit more of the film’s focus. It wears its influences overtly, and while the overall effect is still something new, marketing the film as an “Iranian feminist vampire western” conjures some greater expectations than the film ultimately delivers on. Despite a rather breezy runtime of 107 minutes, the film is stretched at points, lingering on shots and actions for added emotional effect half the time, and the other half just sitting when it should be moving.
Its handful of flaws aside, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a remarkable debut from a new talent, who manages to manipulate a strange collection of disparate influences that span 1950s teen romances, surreal horror, Sergio Leone westerns, gangster films and the malaise of modern Iran. It’s not as original as its premise might suggest, but it’s a cool film that deserves to be seen by many and deserves to propel Amirpour to even greater heights for her (hopefully) inevitable sophomore feature.
