A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night: film review

spooky season viewing...

Photo credit: Sheila Vand as the (vampire) girl. Logan Pictures.

This is a 2015 review of a 2015 film, it was originally published in The London Economic. Yet it’s a film I return to most Halloweens; I’m not really into slashers or the perhaps more obvious ‘spooky season’ films but I highly recommend this film as alternative Halloween week viewing…

---

Referred to only as The Girl: here is a heroine you can root for, a vigilante, feminist, vampire with excellent taste in music plus skateboarding ability, yes please! Not that this heroine is overtly kick-ass; she’s a quiet, lonely soul but if anything this makes her even more appealing. Even the basic fact of seeing a female, and a vulnerable looking female at that, stalking the streets at night (as opposed to being stalked), was in itself satisfying. Ana Lily Amirpour’s feature length debut is a wonderful mix of genres and references yet simultaneously-and perhaps because of this eclectic blending-unlike anything I’d seen before. As the tagline goes this is the first Iranian Vampire Western and thank goodness it’s here; I didn’t know this is what I was waiting for but it’s certainly filled a strange hole in my life.

The action takes place in the vice-ridden, desolate Iranian town of Bad City, (actually shot in an deserted Californian oil town), where The Girl (Shelia Vand) moves stealthily around gliding in full chador, or else on skateboard, targeting the cities worst inhabitants. The chador of course serves as a vampires cape and adds to the films uncanny tone yet this Girl seems to be a very secular kind of vampire and the question as to why she wears this traditional covering hovers. Other comments on the middle-east can be found in the ever-growing pit of bodies at the towns outskirts that no one seems especially bothered about.

Vampires are regularly cast as lonely, tortured by their own, often unwanted but compulsory, blood-lust, and this is true of the Girl to an extent and yet there’s something different about the way she operates. There’s a bloody kind of justice in her choices of prey; it’s the abusers and predators that get bit. She even practices a terrifying version of moral education for The Little Boy of the town (Milad Eghbali). Plus the Girl is uber cool; this is a Vice Film after all. An early scene of her dancing alone in her room to Farah in her Breton striped top is just gorgeous. And to add to all this coolness The Persian James Dean aka Arash Marandi, (thought I was the first one to notice the similarity but the press notes had already declared him thus), plays love interest to the Girl, as one of the few (only?) good men left in Bad City. Watching him and Vand on screen together is mesmerising. Watching Dominic Rains, who plays the city Pimp, on the other hand, is an at turns intimidating and hilarious experience. Misogynistic, bullying and presenting a constant undercurrent of threat, The Pimp, is yet ripe for ridicule. One of the funniest scenes is of him coked-up, pumping dumbbells in his animal print and leather-clad pad trying to impress Vand with his dance moves.

Photo credit: Arash Marandi. Pretty pictures.

The other great source of humour here comes from Masuka The Cat, stray, then pet to Marandi, and later Vand. His massive saucer eyes are always there watching, judging, freaking the other characters out. The Cat diffuses and layers other moments of tension too, particularly the closing car scene. Are we perhaps in the Golden Age of cats on film? (With every hipsters perfect accessory being a fluffy ball of feline, a la Llweyn Davis’ cat and Fluffy the cat in Alex Ross Perry’s Listen up Philip!)

Photo credit: stills from film sourced from an amazing site called Cinema Cats.

To quote the director herself this film is: ‘like Sergio Leone and David Lynch had an Iranian rock ‘n’ roll baby, and then Nosferatu came and babysat for them’. Sound good? I think so! (Trailer here and you can watch it here.)

Thank you very much indeed for reading! More film and other recommendations can be found here (books, podcasts, websites, stuff). My crypto-maniac personal essay can be found here and my first-love fiction can be found here. Please do forward, share, like, comment, subscribe and explore the archive here. (You will now receive special rewards for sharing, details on how this works here.)

Happy Halloween and feliz día de los Muertos!

Love,

Emma x o x o

p.s. I’d love to hear your ‘spooky season’ watchlist recommendations below…