Review: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Picture this: a child walks up to a soda fountain. She has a large cup and now must decide which soda to choose; does she pick the lemony Spite? The complex Dr. Pepper? The classic Coke? The far-too-sweet-and-unnaturally-colored Hawaiian Punch? Unable to decide and wanting the best characteristics of each, she squirts all of them into her cup. The resulting concoction is either the best combination she's every tasted or the most disguising barely-drinkable mess of flavors, depending on the ratio and choice of the combination.

It is easy to imagine a film working very similarly; when you mix concepts and genres, what results can be be either fascinating and brilliant or a confusing and barely-watchable mess. This weekend I got the chance to see one such film: the Iranian, 1950s and Spaghetti Western inspired, black-and-white, independent, vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night from writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a gorgeous film. In stunning black and white, each shot looks like it could be captured as a still photograph and hung in a gallery. The high-contrast and dreamy composition is amazing, and it sets the tone of the film well.

Our movie opens in an open desert setting, where our protagonist Arash poses very much like an Iranian James Dean.

  

Arash lives in a town surrounded by oil fields and named literally "Bad City." The city is filled with empty streets and a ravine literally filled with dead bodies, something no character in the film verbally acknowledges, and what little we see of the town's living members consists of drug addicts, beggar children, prostitutes, and drug-dealing pimps. Arash tries to take care of his addicted father and works as a gardener for a rich family outside of town, but the life stretched before him looks like a dead-end. There's nowhere to go and seemingly no escape.

While we get to know Arash and Bad City, a nameless girl wanders the town's streets at night, cloaked from head to toe in a traditional hijab. In real-life Iran, it is unusual for women to travel alone; they usually travel with friends or family. A woman alone is a potential victim for male violence or advancements, and thus should feel threatened. This is not the case in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night; instead, the lone woman is the threat to the men who come across her path.

She is a vampire, feeding off of the worst of the town's populace. It's an interesting parallel; those members who seem the most "parasitic" are those she is most drawn to kill - feeding off of and killing those who are most "feeding off of" (and making sick) the town as a whole.

The black and white of the film practically screams 1920s and '30s classic horror; it seems no accident that the girl's hijab often resembles the classic Universal Dracula cape. (This is especially emphasized when Arash goes to a drug-fueled costume party as "Dracula.") This makes what is so different about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night's setting so noticeable. The setting itself becomes a character of sorts, just as Dracula's castle and Transylvania does in the classic monster movie. Director Amirpour cuts back to the pumping oil often after murder scenes, paralleling and making the audience question who or what is truly draining this town dry.

Like Byzantium and Let the Right One In (which I'll be reviewing again in full shortly), our out-of-place human (our Rebel Without a Cause in this case) finds a bond with the vampire, seemingly drawn to her without fully knowing why. The scenes of their budding connection and romance are slow and stunning. Slow and sensual, the screen practically feels electric with emotional intimacy.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night should have been a bizarre film to watch. The soundtrack is a mix of Persian music, rock and roll, dance music, orchestral, and Spaghetti Western tones. The film jumps from scene to scene in a dream-like way, keeping time and events somewhat disorienting. The girl is terrifying and sweet, our hero and villain all at once. The influences and themes of the film sometimes seem only somewhat connected, and other times perfectly paralleled. But ultimately, it all works - incredibly well, in fact.

While I'm not sure that A Girl Walks Home at Night will linger with me quite as much as Jarmush's Only Lovers Left Alive, it is another stunning addition to the a new wave of art-vampire-films and is an amazing, haunting, and beautiful work of art in its own right. The movie definitely has a "flavor" that I'll want to revisit again.


Rating: 4.5 out of 5 bites