A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (aka دختری در شب تنها به خانه می‌رود)(Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) Darkness falls on Bad City in Iran, an industry town surrounded by pumping oil derricks and refineries.

Down one of the dilapidated streets an old man and heroin addict (Marshall Manesh) is weaving down the street. He doesn't notice that across from him a figure is matching him step for step—a woman (Sheila Vand) in a black chador. But, when he stops, she stops. He turns to face her, and she parrots the move, staring at him. Unnerved, he turns and continues down the street and the split-second he does, so does she.  He stops again, and without even glancing his way, she stops also. They turn and face each other again. He asks her what she wants and there is no answer, just the stare. He raises his arm the direction he's going. And, as he watches, she raises a cloaked arm in the same direction.

 

He starts to run down the street.

Already you're unnerved, but the wordless interplay between the two night-crawlers only raises the hackles a couple more centimeters as you anticipate what could happen next. Director Ana Lily Amirpour, expanding her short film of the same title, always keeps you guessing. Words are few—and spoken in Persian—but the wide-angle black-and-white visuals provided by Lyle Vincent tell you all you need to know and sometimes those shots have a pulsating frisson that will recall a Fellini landscape, a monster movie, or the French new wave by means of James Dean. The pictures hold you in thrall like the stare of a corpse.

Welcome to A Girl Walks Home Along at Night, self-described as "The first Iranian vampire spaghetti western." As a description, that's a little "flip" but it's also not enough, limiting the breadth of what the movie is. Sure, the widescreen shots put you in mind of Sergio Leone and one sequence sounds like it could have been scored by a blaring Ennio Morricone arena trumpet. But, Amirpour has taken the blasted landscapes of Italian neo-realism and combined it with German expressionism in a surreal stew of high-contrast images that seem to shimmer on the screen.

Just the title sets off tension. Girls do not walk home alone at night under sharia law, and if they do, something is very wrong, even desperate. Women travel in groups, accompanied as there is strength in numbers. Apparently, that's not required in "Bad City", where bodies are carried to a mass dumping ground just off the highway.

We meet Arash (Arash Marandi), who is the son of that wasted father in the second paragraph. Mom's dead (or run away) and Dad is addicted to heroin and good-for-nothing. His long-suffering son has to pay for dad's "medicine" and the debts to the local pusher-pimp (Dominic Rains) have resulted in the dealer taking Arash's prized 1957 Ford Thunderbird. The kid does odd-jobs for the rich and powerful oil families like gardening and minor home repair, but it's not enough to feed Dad's habit, and he's looking to scratch out a better life for himself. Getting himself a cat is the first thing.

But, unknown to Arash, his path is going to cross with "The Girl" (Vand), who is none other than a vampire in the desert. The Girl looks young, but judging by the posters on her wall, she's been playing tunes on her old record player since before the 1970's. At night, she goes on the prowl, doing "bad" things to "bad" people—men for the most part as one would think. At one point, she accosts a young boy and repeatedly asks him if he's a good boy, and then warns him of the unspeakable things she'll do to him if he isn't. She'll be watching. It's no wonder he runs off without his skate board. The Girl takes it; the prowling can go a lot faster. And the visual of her coasting down the street, her chardor flying behind her, has definite vampire similarities.

How about the vampirism? Well, it's nail-biting up to the second knuckle. Just as Aminpour takes her time in scenes letting them play out at a deliberate (but natural) pace, the vampire attacks happen all of a rush, ramp-edited to a super-natural level. The dread and presence of dread are all creatively handled by a subtle, itchy sound design and score, which at times feel indistinguishable from each other. And the addition of pop songs only adds to verisimilitude rather than distractions.

It's a tense, sometimes tender, saga of striking back against oppression...of all kinds. And one can only wonder—as one does throughout the entire movie—what happens next?