‘I’m bad…’
There is a nagging feeling within the vampire subgenre that if you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all. While that is certainly true of the many, many incarnations of the Dracula myth, there are prominent examples of films that have pushed the vampire movie forward. Let the Right One In. The Lost Boys. Only Lovers Left Alive. And, in 2014, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night…
Shot in arty black-and-white and set in the fictional Iranian ghost-town Bad City, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, written and directed by Ana Lily Amripour follows a prostitute named Atti (Mozhan Marno), a young, hardworking Iranian man (Arasha Marandi), his heroin-addicted father Hossein (Marshall Manesh) and the titular ‘girl’ (Sheila Vand) as each character attempts to exist in a place that reeks of loneliness and death.
There isn’t much in terms of plot here. Amripour instead focuses on vibes, shooting the Northern Californian town of Taft as if it is an Iranian slum. The use of light and shadow here is masterful, to the point where I can say that this is one of the few black-and-white films that would gain absolutely nothing by being converted to colour. The Girl, played with nuance and menace by Vand, subverts the preconceived notions of the title. While she does walk the streets alone at night, it is she who is the predator, a series of hapless men the prey. This reversal of societal norms is typical of a film that never chooses the easy option. Witness the soundtrack. A mixture of neo-Spaghetti Western guitars, Iranian pop music and Western indie rock, somehow when mixed together it all works.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a mood piece that would be perfect for a cold Halloween night complete with howling winds and the darkest of dark skies. It also prominently features a cat. What more could you ask?