A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is set in a town called Bad City and is shot in black and white. The town’s inhabitants seem to solely consist of a marmalade cat, a young man who cares for his heroin-addicted father, a rich girl whom the young man works for, a tattooed pimp and drug dealer, a beggar boy, an aging prostitute, and a chador-wearing, Breton striped long sleeve t-shirt clad, skateboarding vampire chick. Iranian ex-pat Ana Lily Amirpour directed A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, and critics praised the film as the first Iranian vampire Western though it was shot in California because everyone speaks Persian, and it is supposed to be set in Iran. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night has subtitles. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night did nothing for me.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night reminded me of a mashup of a sedate small town conceived by Frank Miller meets Nadja, another black and white film that filtered the vampire genre through an artsy fartsy eye. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night has cool visual moments and motifs-the idea of dressing up like Dracula for a costume party and a vampire wearing a chador. The Breton striped shirt, the car drama and the interplay between the vampire and the young man felt like allusions to Breathless. I adore vampires, especially if the vampires are women and vigilantes avenging injustice inflicted on other women, but A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night felt too self-conscious. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night felt choreographed first with the story as an afterthought. I need my atmosphere to have a narrative.
Fortunately A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night does not kill the cat. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night has two great assets: Marshall Manesh whom most TV viewers know as Mr. Zamir in Will & Grace and Mozhan Marno whom US House of Cards’ fans may remember as a journalist. It is nice that both actors get meatier roles that go against type, but not enough to make me like A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night.
Maybe I am too much of a Philistine to enjoy A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, but I felt nothing while watching the film, which has everything that I love in a movie: artsy fartsy visuals, vampires, vigilante women. Skip it unless you love art house films and subtitles with strong atmosphere and are short on story.