Review of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) by Filmphonic — 26 May 2015

In her debut feature-length film British-born Iranian-American writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour takes her 2011 short of the same name and expands it into a unique a genre-straddling stylistic mashup of spaghetti-western and horror with clear heart of romance.

Much has been made of the film’s visual style and its aesthetic similarities to Jim Jarmusch’s work with Amirpour choosing to shoot in Monochrome (black & white spectrum) giving the landscape a stark look and smoothing over some of the obvious filming techniques which conspire with the soundtrack to create the familiar “retro-cool” of many recent indies.

There’s a lot to admire about this movie, in a small independent film Amirpour manages to take the “mysterious stranger” element of Sergio Leone westerns and subvert it using a young solitary girl as the ominous spectre that dishes out gruesome “justice” to “Bad City’s” sinful men, a feminist version of the “Angel of Death” paradigm if you will.

Despite the vampiric elements in the film however, this is really not much of a horror with the girl’s paranormal abilities serving only as a mechanism to drive the true heart of the story, an ultimately traditional tale of young forbidden love, albeit between two very nontraditional characters, set in a unique contemporary context.

For all its uniqueness and creativity there are also a lot of issues with the film, there’s way too much technique on show, to the point of tedium, unnecessarily long lingering shots set to an all too familiar Synthpop soundtrack that builds mood but not much else, all of which serve to disguise the fact that there is not much of a story to speak of in another recent indie example of a lot of style over much less substance.

‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’ is no doubt an interesting film debut set in a highly original context, but the sum of its parts does not necessarily translate to a compelling cinematic experience in what feels more like an impressive visual arts project or bizarrely funky music video than a feature length film.

The Bottom Line….

Writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour will have to go a long way to justify the comparisons being made between her and Quentin Tarantino, writing unforgettable dialogue would be task no. 1, but despite the lack of a compelling storyline and issues with execution, ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’ is a refreshing take on a number of different genres and is a welcomingly creative debut from a director we look forward to following in the future.