A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City, a place that reeks of death and loneliness, the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire.
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5 films that influenced A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
What critics say influenced A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
This is a special film, one inspired by but not beholden to comics, graphic novels and the films of David Lynch, in particular Eraserhead.
There’s a bit of Eraserhead in here, and some early Jim Jarmusch: The story may be spare and familiar, but the characters’ submersion invests each moment with an oblique mystery.
It reminded me of watching “Stranger Than Paradise” or “Eraserhead” for the first time (two movies Amirpour has clearly seen) and having that feeling that boils down to “The person who made this is really cool.”
Like vintage Jim Jarmusch, or David Lynch's Eraserhead.
And reminiscent of “Eraserhead” and early Jim Jarmusch.
The the film’s spare-but-layered sound design is reminiscent of Eraserhead, and its haunted, dreamy 1950s quality otherwise evokes David Lynch, when it isn’t calling on Jarmusch.
To Amirpour, the people who live in Bad City (a low-budget variation of "Sin City") aren't as interesting as the city itself, only assigning these personalities surface afflictions to keep them in order (e.g.
The name’s evocation of Frank J. Miller’s comicbook crime capital “Sin City” can hardly be coincidental: Graphic novels are another point of reference of Amirpour, not least in her high-contrast monochrome aesthetic, and she has written one to tie in with the film’s release.
Bad City, undoubtedly inspired at least in part by Sin City, is a town that both literally and figuratively is being drained of blood; where people don’t so much live and merely exist.
It is set in the fictional Iranian ghost town of Bad City (the name nods toward Frank Miller’s Sin City) and plays out like the missing link between Kathryn Bigelow’s first two features; the ultra-cool biker pastiche The Loveless and the latterday vampire flick Near Dark.
This accomplished debut feature in gorgeous black-and-white, from U.S.-based writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, is set in Bad City -- which looks like a contemporary U.S. industrial town with some Western undercurrents and a dash of Frank Miller’s Sin City, though everyone speaks Farsi and an actual vampire roams the street at night.
As Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez did with their decidedly masculine Sin City, so writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour has captured Los Angeles on gorgeous black-and-white video to create the fictional Persian town of Bad City, for what she describes as “the first Iranian vampire western.”
The freshest take on the vampire genre since “Let the Right One In,” “Night” is an intoxicating mix of genres all deftly and lovingly mashed together.
Fans of "Let The Right One In" may get a similar vibe from some scenes in this movie, but The Girl is no child, nor is Arash ( Arash Marandi ), a gardener struggling with his feelings about his junkie father Hossein ( Marshall Manesh ).
Even allowing for the recent cultural ubiquity of fang fiction, “Girl” is too arch and deliberate to cross over in the manner of “Let the Right One In,” but will continue to draw blood on the festival circuit.
Like "Let the Right One In," which is probably the movie's closest equivalent both because of its off-kilter take on vampire lore and the fact that it's in another language, the movie eventually becomes a romance centered around the question: How bad can someone be for you to still love them?
The roll call of international auteurs who have sweated blood in artistic pursuit of vampires during the past decade is impressive: Jim Jarmusch (“Only Lovers Left Alive”), Francis Ford Coppola (“Twixt”), Park Chan-wook (“Thirst”), Neil Jordan (“Byzantium”), Tomas Alfredson (“Let the Right One In”), and so on.
At this point, even those of you who dug “Let the Right One In” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive” and Neil Jordan’s “Byzantium” have concluded that nobody can possibly bring anything new to the bloodsucker genre.
Arguably, the film is stylistically most closely akin to the work of Bruce Weber (best known for directing Calvin Klein commercials and the Chet Baker documentary “Let’s Get Lost”).
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There's a palpable sense of place despite the barren emptiness of the setting, and the same touch of madness that colours David Lynch films (Wild At Heart especially comes to mind, although that might just be the male lead's fondness for a quiff).