“I’m bad.”
I know what you’re thinking: really, another black and white, Iranian, feminist vampire movie? I know, I know; this month has been full of them. But A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is definitely the best of the lot. Ana Lily Amirpour’s remarkably strong debut film aims not for something higher or lower than horror, but something adjacent to it. It might not be frightening in the traditional sense, but it casts the same spell.
The first thing you’ll notice about A Girl Walks Home is that it is utterly gorgeous. Shot by Lyle Vincent in crisp yet painterly black and white (which recalls the great work by Roger Deakins on The Man Who Wasn’t There), Amirpour’s film looks like a photograph come to life. Set in the Iranian ghost town of Bad City, but shot in industrial central California, the backdrop of Girl is all power plants and oil derricks. The black and white intentionally robs the landscape of any glow or character; this could be anywhere. In many ways, this both looks and sounds like a Nick Cave song; our first hint of this is in the opening scene, when Arash (Arash Marandi), looking like the very picture of ’50s cool in his tucked-in white shirt and sunglasses and leather jacket, calmly sneaks into a backyard and steals a cat. We never know the exact provenance of this cat, and he will spend the movie being traded from one character to another (think Inside Llewyn Davis with a vampire). One could say that by taking the cat, Arash sets things into motion.
Arash lives with his heroin-addict father Hossein (Marshall Manesh), who is in deep to his dealer Saeed (Dominic Rains). Hossein will never be able to repay Saeed, so Saeed takes Arash’s Thunderbird. Manesh gives a performance free of vanity; at times he looks nothing short of pitiable. Rains isn’t called on to do much more than be villainous, but he does a good job of it. And Marandi gets to introduce some characterization into Arash very early; despite how cool he looked in the film’s opening, he is helpless to take care of his father, and meekly lets Saeed leave in his car. His only recourse is to punch a brick wall, which earns him a cast that he will wear for the rest of the film.
Amirpour withholds the introduction of the titular girl (who is never given a name, only a designation). We first see her in the rearview mirror of the Thunderbird, where Saeed, also a pimp, has coerced a woman who works for him, Atti (Mozhan Marno) into giving him oral sex. In the girl’s presentation, Amirpour plays with Western prejudice; the girl’s long black niqab makes her look wraithlike, and she seems not to appear but to materialize. Saeed encounters her while walking home – why he doesn’t drive the Thunderbird is never made clear; the car seems to move itself around town – and invites her to his apartment, the tacky opulence of which is straight out of Goodfellas. He tries to seduce her, confident in his ability to do so. When he puts his finger in her mouth, she bites it off, then kills him.
Sheila Vand is nearly mute as the girl, and when she does speak, her words are clipped and toneless. In her niqab, she looks like a phantom. One of the film’s most terrifying shots is of the girl coolly regarding the sobbing, wounded Saeed. She looks at him with a clinical detachment, and in Vand’s wide, expressive eyes we see no trace of humanity. Amirpour’s camera loves Vand the way it would a silent movie star. Vand’s presence is effortless and magnetic. The scariest shot of the film has her cornering a street urchin (Milad Eghbali) and asking him three times if he’s a good boy. “I can take your eyes out of your skull,” she says suddenly, her voice distorting into something malevolent and ageless. She promises to watch him for the rest of his life, and the next shot shows her leaving on his skateboard.
A Girl Walks Home plays with our sympathies; the girl is clearly monstrous, but outside of her nighttime activities – she seems to follow people for the sheer sport of it – she seems like an ordinary young woman, dancing to vinyl records in her apartment. Ultimately we side with her; such is the power of the film’s feminism. She is in rebellion against the entitlement of men. There’s a running theme in the film of men taking what does not belong to them: Arash steals the cat, a pair of earrings, and later, Saeed’s money and stash of drugs; Saeed steals Arash’s car and feels entitled to Atti’s body.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night exists not in plot, but in scenes. One of its most memorable is of a costume party a night club, where the clubgoers are turned into a grotesque menagerie. Their faces pop out of the darkness in shots reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s M. Amirpour’s work here also recalls that of Nicolas Winding Refn, in its examination of aesthetics, music, fashion, beauty, and horror. It has a strange fixation on Western culture, seen in Arash’s car and his greaser wardrobe.
It would have been easy to turn this into a love story, but that’s not what the film is concerned with (also, that movie exists, and it’s called Let the Right One In). Arash’s affection for the girl is tested after she kills his father, and one could argue that she did it because he was hurting Arash, or because he had bound Atti’s hands and forced her to take heroin with him. I see no reason why it can’t be both. The girl helps a fellow woman and rescues the man in distress. When she and Arash set off in his Thunderbird, cat in tow, to start over somewhere else, Arash is behind the wheel. But he wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the girl. She saved him.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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