A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

A feminist persian vampire western with mesmerising black and white cinematography. The atmosphere itself makes it a great experience. Then there is the performances that are perfectly captured and even the cat does a fantastic job.

Set in Iran, but filmed in California, this is a simple tale of a hip, young guy called Arash who falls in love with a mysterious girl that happens to be a vampire. Beautifully filmed in black & white with a fantastic soundtrack this touches on issues such as addiction, greed, sex and love. Well acted, including Masuka the cat who gets a well deserved credit. Some people may be put off by it being Persian language, which would be a shame. I certainly look forward to watching it again.

Only cinema can do this. Only cinema can depict a Persian vampire- woman in a chador skateboarding down a lamplit street and make it work, can make it surreal and stunning and totally germane to the plot. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is full of such moments, full of gratuitous genius, black humour and cinematic magic.Filmed in monochrome, the minimalist dialogue in subtitled Farsi, the action takes place in 'Bad City', Bakersfield Ca. standing in for Iran. Our hero is Arash (Arash Marandi), a James Dean wannabe with a flash American car he explains took him 2,191 working days (exactly six years including one leap year) to buy. Arash dutifully cares for his ageing, heroin-addicted father, who owes money to a ferally abusive pimp and drug dealer played with evil gusto by Dominic Rains. The dealer takes Arash's treasured automobile in part payment of the father's drug debts. In a vast, bleak night space of almost Soviet immensity, Rains's character treats one of his prostitutes with laconic cruelty, abusing her and ejecting her from Arash's car. She sobs on the ground. Watching from a distance is a silent sentinel, nun-like in her chador, the Girl Who Walks Home Alone At Night.Named only as 'The Girl' in the credits, this is Sheila Vand's avenging dark angel. 'I have done bad things,' she tells Arash further down the story. 'I am bad.' She brings herself wordlessly to the pimp's attention, meeting his eyes with an impassive sadism reminiscent of Rooney Mara's character in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In his cocaine-fuelled hubris he takes her home. It does not end well for him.Arash, now travelling by bicycle, goes to his work as a gardener and handyman. 'Shaydah the Princess', the daughter of the house where he is working, is a flirtatious, spoiled little rich girl, chatting mindlessly on her cellphone and assessing the result of her rhinoplasty in the mirror. He spots her jewelled earrings on the dresser and gives way to temptation. He wants his car back. He takes the earrings to the pimp's house, arriving just as The Girl is leaving.Inside, he discovers the pimp's mutilated, blood-drained body. On the coffee table is a briefcase stuffed with cash and drugs. He empties it, takes his car keys, and flees.One more scene remains to round off the film's characterisations. The Girl confronts a skateboarding boy, repeatedly demanding -- her face twisted with passion and menace -- 'Are you a good boy? Are you?' She will be watching him, she threatens; she will rip out his eyes and feed them to the dogs if he transgresses. The terrified boy runs away, leaving his skateboard.Arash, driving his reclaimed and beloved car, arrives at a costume party dressed as Count Dracula, his pockets stuffed with the pimp's drugs and cash. Shaydah is there with her friend the 'Skeleton Party Girl', actually a cameo role played by the film's writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour. Drugs are taken. Arash, rejected by Shaydah, finds himself in the street, tripping, lost in Bad City. He is staring at a street lamp, entranced by the light, when The Girl comes skateboarding past.If all stories are ultimately about the search for love, here is the central dynamic of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Under the street light is Arash, the holy innocent, dressed up for a party as the vampire Dracula. Into his life comes The Girl, a genuine vampire killer, on a skateboard. Light Angel and Dark Angel are brought together in a bizarre, comic coincidence. How will this play out?No backstory is given for The Girl, no explanation of how she became who and what she is. We are left to assume that it is something primally dark. Yet something in the character of Arash touches her, something that softens her hard and murderous heart. And something in her draws Arash. Their instinctive, developing symbiosis is brilliantly symbolised by a scene in which he pierces her ears with a safety pin in order to present her with the diamond earrings he stole from Shaydah. She accepts the pain, she accepts the jewels, she accepts the proffered love. The vampire-woman is not tamed -- you can never see that happening -- but she is shown a new and different life beyond the blighted, heartless wasteland of Bad City.Amirpour has created a masterpiece of atmosphere and vision, aided and underpinned by an eclectic soundtrack of mingled Western and Persian pop. The backdrop is nominally Iran, actually California, a setting which in itself produces an austere, strangely familiar Everyplace -- the landscape of the lost soul -- where cruelty, selfishness and existential absurdity besiege from all quarters the simple human longing for Love. There are recurring moments of crazy beauty. The editing could have been a little tighter, which is why I give A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night nine stars instead of a faultless 10. But that is a quibble; every character, every performance, burns into the memory. Amirpour's writing and directing creates a world where the outlandish becomes more real than the superficial 'reality' we inhabit in our daily lives. Once again, only cinema can do this. Breathtaking.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night(2014) Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains, Rome Shadanloo, Milad Eghbali, Reza Sixo Safai, and Mozhan Marnò Directed By: Ana Lily Amirpour Review THE FIRST IRANIAN VAMPIRE WESTERN Hello Kiddies your Pal The Crypt-Critic is stalking the night wit his favorite suckers for the night in a Foreign land. In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire. This plot/synopsis it sounds like something I would invest whether it be foreign or western. I usually only watch Foreign films if there Horror, Monsters, or even sometimes romance. This was both but I wasn't a fan. I mean I liked Let The Right one In. But this film it just came off as like a film with a good idea and acting behind it but a weak narrative for telling what would otherwise be a magnificent story. I'm giving it a 2 and a half out of five.