Review of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) by Kevin L — 29 Dec 2015

A renewed vitality for the vampire subgenre, Ana Lily Amirpour's feature length directorial debut with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a unique milestone in horror and vampire romance betwixt subdued storytelling and beautiful filmmaking that is set within a fictional ghost town called Bad City, where the authorities are non-existent, the dead are hauled off to be dropped in ditches crowded by other corpses and a mysterious girl that stalks the ominous, monochrome streets on a skateboard in what film connoisseurs of Youtube's comment section have so eloquently dubbed as "Pretentious feminist bullshit".

Flipping the genre on its head - as evident by the loose double entendre and red herring title - and using the cultural Iranian context to its strengths, Amirpour's The Girl is an enigmatic, beautiful force to be reckoned with as she traverses the streets clothed almost entirely in a black hijab and a striped white top - which feeds into the black and white cinematography - that creates a sense of dread each time the character enters the frame with her pale face singularly floating against the black abyss of the night to judge and possibly dole out justice for the citizens, or increasing lack thereof, of Bad City.

After meeting Arash, a conflicted character that is struggling to cope with his father's drug addiction, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes somewhat of a romantic turn that surprisingly avoids the innumerable clichés and gender stereotypes rampant within otherwise clear-cut romance stories. It instead focuses on the strength of the characters, the physicality that Sheila Vand brings as The Girl and the emotiveness that Arash Marandi brings with his character.

As a perfect marriage of art house and horror that is told entirely in black and white as an Iranian Spaghetti Western with a vibrant selection of music, Amirpour's story of The Girl and Arash is one that is bare-bones at best as it feeds entirely on the bleak, moody atmosphere and fragmented storytelling that is told through the various sightings around the city and its small, yet talented cast and their characters. And though lacking in any sense of tension, the timeless visit into the haunting out of time purgatory of Bad City is enough for those that the film sinks its fangs into to lose themselves within the symbolic scope that is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.