In short: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Thinking of slow movies, as I sometimes do, how about Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iran-set (or at least a dream/nightmare of Iran filtered through many things) film that’s publicized as “the first Iranian vampire western”? Of course it is not an Iranian film but rather a Persian language film made by Americans with exile Iranian roots and actually shot in California, and it is most certainly not a western, unless having some spaghetti western like moments on the soundtrack and some desert in it makes a film a western. But then, that’d make Lawrence of Arabia a western too.

I’d rather call it an arthouse vampire movie, probably. Unlike with some (some, mind you) films whose slowness seems based on the filmmakers’ inability to be precise or to pace their work properly, slowness is quite obviously an intrinsic part of A Girl’s view of its (night-time) world, a world which might be an Iran interpreted as an embodiment of loneliness and desolation in which the titular girl (a fascinating, enigmatic performance by Sheila Vand) being a vampire seems only the right and proper thing for the place.


Stylistically, there are certainly moments that remind of the dreamy moments of David Lynch, and I can’t help but feel there’s a bit of Jean Rollin in it also, at least in the sense that large parts of it look and feel like very personal and very poetic expression that just happens to come together as something that has elements of the horror film as well as of old-school (I’d say early Jim Jarmusch) US indie cinema and the nouvelle vague. The really great thing about A Girl though isn’t that it feels related to some rather great kinds of cinema but how much it still feels like a film completely Amirpour’s own – the parallels and influences are just that. In fact, there seems not an imitative or ironically quoting bone in this film’s body, so it’s not much of a surprise that I found myself spellbound by it, its black and white poetry, its social and political consciousness that feels utterly organic and natural, and a slowness that’s there so a viewer really looks at what the film is showing her.