A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Sheila Vand plays a vampire in the visually striking
Iranian film, "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night." 

A beautiful and mysterious female vampire roams the dark and desolate streets, satiating her strange thirst for blood while avenging crimes in “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” the stylish and often scintillating black and white debut feature from Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour. Screened at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and cleverly billed as a Persian vampire western, the movie is a visually striking and irresistibly entertaining amalgam of horror, film noir and dark comedy.

The movie was filmed in Taft, California near Bakersfield but takes place in a fictitious town called Bad City, distinctly imagined by Amirpour as an industrial wasteland of sorts, with cold, deserted streets lined with hazy, orbed streetlamps casting harsh, high-contrast light and shadows. Such visual details, along with oil rigs and power plants belching clouds of smoke in the background, evoke the Mexican border town of Orson Welles’ masterful film noir “Touch of Evil” (1958). There’s even a deep ravine running along one lonely road, perfect for dumping the occasional corpse.

“I’ve done bad things,” the main character, known only as The Girl (Sheila Vand, dangerous and radiant, like an archetypal femme fatale), confesses at one point. She’s not the only one. In Bad City, a variety of denizens—prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts—ensure the place lives up to its name. Our lone vampire often appears sad-eyed and taciturn, at once mournful and vulnerable, yet eerily capable of quick, scary bursts of violence.

But the movie is not strictly atmosphere and dread. One night, after frightening a small boy, the vampire ends up with the kid’s skateboard and a bit of dark, almost farcical comedy follows as she is seen incongruously speeding down the street like a teenager, the toy’s wheels whirring obliviously underneath. Another funny moment—when the vampire emotionlessly mimics a man, stalking him as he walks on the opposite side of the street—is reminiscent of the Marx brothers. The way Amirpour finds oddly ingenious ways to insert humor into the story without violating the integrity of the characters recalls some of Jim Jarmusch’s work, like the deadpan classic “Stranger than Paradise” (1984).

The interesting use of lenses and focal depth also make “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” consistently stunning to look at. Amirpour is fascinated with lighting and shifting focus between foreground and background characters, leading to some luminous, Tarantino-esque imagery. The way the director goes from a close-up of a cat’s eye to the shape of the vampire seen from behind—thematically linking woman and beast—plays like an elegant homage to Jacques Tourneur’s brilliant noir “Cat People” (1942).

There is the slightest premonition of romance when the protagonist meets the morose, tortured but basically good-hearted Arash (Arash Marandi). But whether the vampire can leave the demons of Bad City behind long enough to escape with the handsome hero is better left unsaid. “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” might sound like a lot of parts that don’t quite make up a whole, but that said, those parts are pretty good and Amirpour’s unquestionable artistry is worth watching.