To call Ana Lily Amirpour’s film the best Iranian hipster vampire western you’ve ever seen may sound like faint praise but that convoluted, unique sub-genre (of which it is the only example we know) demonstrates just how individual this film is. Amirpour blends elements together with little respect paid to traditional ideas of what goes with what – Jim Jarmusch, comic books, surf rock, 80s synth pop, 50s greasers, Die Antwoord, Carnival Of Souls, feminism and David Lynch all spring to mind at various points, sometimes mashed together into one vivid, beautiful fever dream. It doesn’t take a good writer or director to throw seemingly random ingredients into the same pot, but it takes a damn good one to make it feel cohesive and that’s what marks A Girl Walks Home At Night as such an impressive film and one hell of a calling card for this talented filmmaker.
The film opens with Arash (Arash Marandi) – a young man who has clearly taken fashion tips from Jimmy Dean in Rebel Without A Cause – loitering by a fence. He ducks in, steals a cat and ducks back out. As he walks away cuddling the cat, he passes a trench filled with the bodies of dead men. With this one image, Amirpour immediately sets up the world of Bad City, a ghost town that is as much Nowheresville, USA as it is Iran (the film was actually shot in California). Bad City is the kind of town where oil derricks churn endlessly, where the streets are empty, the buildings run down, and where a wrong turn could lead you onto an oddly picturesque street or into the arms of a pretty girl with a taste for blood.
From the first time the superb Sheila Vand appears as the nameless girl vampire of the film’s title, she commands the screen. Her stillness and expression – a kind of curious fascination that echoes Scarlett Johansson in Under The Skin – emphasise her otherness and isolation from the few denizens of Bad City. In public, her trendy garb is cloaked in a hijab, serving as both a curtain that frames her offbeat prettiness and as an immense of black that trails behind her as she floats down empty streets on a skateboard like a descending bat, picking off men in her lone fight against male aggression and dominance.
If all of this sounds ridiculously cool, it’s because it is. But the film circumvents hipster detachment by placing a tender love story at its core. Arash’s tribulations – which start with his junkie father and a vile drug dealer/pimp (Dominic Rains, looking for all the world like Ninja from Die Antwoord) – lead him to Vand’s vampire, though she’s never referred to as such. Her lair, instead of a coffin or a vault, is a bedroom festooned with pictures of 80s idols, where she listens to romantic synth pop and applies copious eyeliner. Their courtship is built around innocence – completely at odds with the cynicism and violence around them – except for one moment that is more sexually charged than a hundred Fifty Shades Of Grey slap and tickle sessions.
With A Girl Walks Home At Night, Amirpour has found the sweet spot between romance, horror, social commentary and monochrome cool. Not only that, but she’s crafted a film that is thought-provoking, moving and hauntingly beautiful, one that embeds itself and replays through your brain repeatedly. It’s close to perfect in its tiny cultish oeuvre and it will be fascinating to see what Amirpour does with a bigger sandpit and more toys. As it stands, she joins people like Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Spring) in bringing much-needed heart back to the horror genre.
