A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Plot synopsis:
A young, hardworking Iranian man named Arash lives with and takes care of his heroin-addicted father, Hossein. They are harassed by a cruel, drug-dealer pimp named Saeed, who seizes the young man's prized car in exchange for money the father owes him. In a crime of opportunity, Arash steals a pair of diamond earrings from the wealthy young woman he works for, Shaydah.
The pimp comes across a strange young woman in a chador at night, and back at his apartment she grows long fangs and first bites off his finger, then goes for his neck. As she leaves, she passes by Arash, who has come to offer the earrings for his car. He finds Saeed dead, and takes back his car keys along with the drugs and cash. Arash dresses up as Dracula, and goes to a night club where he is seduced by Shaydah into taking one of the ecstasy pills he is selling. Under the influence, he is rejected by her, and ends up lost at night on the street.
The woman with the chador spends her time listening to music alone in her apartment, or bedeviling pedestrians at night, until she comes across the lost Arash. He shows vulnerability and compassion, and she takes him to her home, where they listen to music, and she resists his exposed neck. They meet the next night, and she says that he does not know the terrible things she has done. He is unfazed, gives her the earrings and – at her request – pierces her ears with a safety pin, but she eventually leaves.
Atti, a prostitute who works for the pimp, is followed at night by the woman in the chador, and they retreat to the prostitute's apartment. They have a conversation during which the woman in the chador realizes that Atti no longer remembers what it is to desire. She leaves.
Suffering from heroin withdrawal, Hossein has an episode where he believes that Arash's cat is his dead wife. Infuriated by his father, Arash gives him drugs and money and throws him out, telling him to take the cat with him. Hossein goes to Atti and forces her to take heroin with him. They are found by the woman with the chador, who kills Hossein. After Atti helps her dispose of Hossein's body, she tells her to take the cat and leave.
The following morning, Arash discovers Hossein's body. Distressed, he runs to the apartment of the woman in the chador and begs her to run away with him. As she is gathering up her things, the cat appears and Arash realizes that she had something to do with his father's death. Arash and the woman drive off together but he pulls off to the side of the road, angry and undecided about what to do. He eventually gets back in the car and the two drive off together.

Tags: western, psychedelic, suspenseful, murder

Review:
Ana Lily Amirpour presents the first ever Iranian romantic vampire thriller that blends the styles of Spaghetti Westerns, graphic novels and 1950's rebel flicks, while making a social statement regarding Muslim women.This festival favorite is an expanded version of Ms. Amirpour's 2011 short film of the same title, and the use of black and white, combined with cinematographer Lyle Vincent's extraordinary photography, delivers a beautifully stark dream-like atmosphere that lends itself well to the sparse dialogue approach.Despite minimal conversation, we quickly recognize Saeed (Dominic Rains) as the ultra-arrogant drug dealer and bullying pimp, Arash (Arash Marandi) as the hard-working dutiful nice guy who sees himself as a would-be James Dean, Hossein (Marshall Manash) as the drug-addicted dad who burdens his son, and Atti (Mozhan Marno) as the aging, powerless prostitute with little hope.
Otherwise, she is the lonesome vampire in search of connection who periodically weeds out the bad men – simultaneously improving society and empowering women.It's an odd production as the characters speak Farsi, but filming took place outside Bakersfield, California in a locale that fits the story town's name, Bad City.
The last few years were great for vampire subgenre, reviving it with a few films that have became instant favorites and, in my opinion, deserve their place in film history.Let The Right One In and Only Lovers Left Alive are notable examples, and now A Girl has joined them, forming fantastic trinity of style, ideas, cinematography and unparalleled atmosphere.
Set in a bleak dusty place called Bad City, a settlement full of drug addicts, vice and despair, it follows a small group of characters one of which is a female vampire who roams the streets at night preying on the worst in her society.It wouldn't be unfair to say that this is an exercise primarily on style over substance.
It is also a mash-up of film genres with a hero and car which evokes 50's teenage rebel films, Ennio Morricone inspired music that references spaghetti westerns, moments that recall the odd tone of David Lynch movies, the visual look of Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish (1983) and the revisionist approach to the vampire film typified by Let the Right One In (2008).
The vampire's movements are hilarious (not sure if on purpose)."A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" ends being a movie that will be enjoyed more by people who like their movies about atmosphere and 'messages'.
A calm, alluring & subversive art-house endeavour from Ana Lily Amirpour in what's her feature film debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is as impressive as it is unconventional, as beautiful as it is brooding, and as hypnotic as it is haunting.
Touted as "the first Iranian vampire western", it is a fascinating blend of horror, romance & western that's original, meditative & masterly composed.Set in an Iranian ghost-town that reeks of death & loneliness, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night tells the story of a lonesome vampire that wanders the desolate streets at night; stalking, killing or protecting whoever she deems fit.
But things change when she comes across a guy who's just as lost as her and, in an effort to connect with each other, something beautiful is born between the two.Written & directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is crafted with stunning restraint & presents the up-n-coming filmmaker in absolute control of her craft.
The story takes place in Bad City, an Iranian town in the middle of nowhere, and the deserted locations, vacant streets & fraction of denizens add to its graveyard like aura while the resurfacing shots of drilling pumps perpetually sucking oil out of Earth serves as an interesting companion to its vampiric themes.The script is only concerned with the doings of two characters, Arash & The Girl, and the rest of the town's inhabitants are discerned by simple tags assigned to them.
Another one of my favourite aspects is its mesmerising soundtrack, comprising of sensibly chosen tracks that are evocative and always in check with the emotional requirements of any given moment.Coming to the performances, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night features a committed cast in Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains & Rome Shadanloo, and each one of them get sufficient time on screen.
Vand's subtle expressions & unwavering gaze turns her silent showcase into the most impressive performance in the movie and she is brilliantly supported by the rest of the cast, each playing their part with utmost conviction.On an overall scale, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a somber effort that's elegiac in its approach, dreamlike in its presentation, and subdued in its addressing of topical themes.
"A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" is a movie that you thought couldn't exist: an Iran-set movie that mixes the spaghetti western genre with vampires.
I have always loved a good, offbeat vampire movie such as the original Let The Right One In. I rate A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night just below that movie -- but still an outstanding horror movie -- in a genre in which excellence is so rare.The actors are great.
I'm guessing the director chose this actress for her eyes -- beautiful and hypnotic.The setting - Bad Town - is the type of bleak, lawless industrial town where a vampire could prey for a long time before moving on.I would have enjoyed this movie in color, but black and white is fitting for its dark atmosphere.
Arash takes back his car and steals some of Saeed's cash and drugs.I was very excited to check out this Iranian vampire movie.
"Be a good boy."Director Ana Lily Amirpour's feature debut has been labelled as the first ever Iranian vampire western, and it does take a completely different approach from most generic films.
It takes place in an Iranian town called Bad City (but was actually filmed in California) where a young James Dean look-alike, Arash (Arash Marandi) is desperately trying to get his father (Mozhan Marno) out of drugs.
But Saeed isn't the only one walking through the streets of Bad City, there is also a mysterious woman simply known as the girl (Sheila Vand) who happens to be a vampire that only feeds on people who terrorize others.
Perhaps having recently seen the other hipster vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive, left me yearning for a similar experience to that one.A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night not only relied on the visuals to set the atmosphere of the film, the soundtrack is also used quite frequently with a couple of songs from White Lies and Federale.
Then comes along a little foreign film called A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night.The opening looks like a spaghetti Western yet sounds like a French art film.
I'm sure the filmmakers were playing off the fact that the vampire's veil is being worn as if though it was Dracula's cape.The movie has a new unique setting but it plays homage to the low budget beatnik films that would be a part of the Something Weird collection, or at least it felt that way.Overall the movie had a cool concept that could have been flushed out better by the filmmakers..
Filmed in black and white, with long shots and almost no background music, the director shouts: look, this is a movie with a higher - ARTISTIC - meaning.
Then she will have made something other than the borrowed, boring botch that is her "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night." Far more interesting reworkings of the Dracula story on film include Jesus Franco's fascinating "Vampyros Lesbos" (1971) or "Blood for Dracula" (1974) directed by Paul Morrissey..
It was filmed in the USA but set in Iran and the cast speak Farsi.A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is shot in black and white to give it a gritty but also an arty look.
She might be dressed in a black chador but she is a vampire who soon gets her fangs on the drug dealer and hunt for other victims.Arash meets the girl and they seem to get along fine, he shows her vulnerability and compassion.The film is ponderous, there is a lot of music being listened to, lots of moody shots, it is very consciously arty.
I thought the film might be making a political metaphor for Iranian society but it is hard to tell.At the end Arash and the girl drive off in the Thunderbird, I just felt they drove away sooner..
It's incredibly boring and slow and the black and white doesn't really make it arthouse all of a sudden.The film is a series of disconnected scenes with no dialogues peppered with shots of an industrial landscape and a nondescript suburbia.Don't watch this movie.
Set in an oil industry ghost town-like city in Iran, this movie, directed by newcomer Ana Lily Amirpour - an American of Iranian descent - is highly reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch's early style.
Set in Iran, but filmed in California, this is a simple tale of a hip, young guy called Arash who falls in love with a mysterious girl that happens to be a vampire.
But A Girl Walks Home at Night arrives too late to the party.Set in the fictional town "Bad City" in Iran, though the film is set in Iran and all the characters speak Persian, it is actually American, it was shot in California, by an American crew and funded by an American production company, Elijah Wood's SpectreVision.
Despite the promising setting the narrative becomes very stale, the characters though not one dimensional are hardly original, Arash is a character who we have seen before, the teenage boy who risks becoming involved in crime, in this case drug dealing, while The Girl, though given a very distinct and creative appearance, lacks much of a personality, the film fails to capitalise on her tortured soul and feeling of timelessness, her only expression of personality is when we see her home with a large collection of records and posters of musicians and singers, though this feels more of the directors personality than the characters.
The main counterpart of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is Tomas Alfredson's 2008 masterpiece Let the Right One In, the film that essentially gave new life to the vampire genre, which Twilight sucked away (excuse the pun).
This film is from the U.S. and is in the Persian language.Using tools such as sharp black-and-white cinematography and a moving score with the addition of enjoyable rock music, director Ana Lily Amirpour succeeds in creating an atmosphere that is eerie and mysterious while always being engaging.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an independent horror movie about a vampire wandering the streets of a desolated Iranian town.
To the outsider watching A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), the movie seems to be, in the director's (Ana Lily Amirpour's) own words, an "American inspired, Iranian, vampire western." In reality, the movie is so much more.
Making Girl a vampire was the only way for the director and writer (Ana Lily Amirpour) to give a woman any tangible power in Iranian society.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night(2014) Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains, Rome Shadanloo, Milad Eghbali, Reza Sixo Safai, and Mozhan Marnò Directed By: Ana Lily Amirpour Review THE FIRST IRANIAN VAMPIRE WESTERN Hello Kiddies your Pal The Crypt-Critic is stalking the night wit his favorite suckers for the night in a Foreign land.
On top of that, as a devout Muslim I was offended to see that this film ridiculed Hijab and showed the main negative character (vampire) wears black robe that is generally worn by Muslim women in Iran, and even worse, in a poster visible in one scene, we could read "If you look like this, call ...
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is full of such moments, full of gratuitous genius, black humour and cinematic magic.Filmed in monochrome, the minimalist dialogue in subtitled Farsi, the action takes place in 'Bad City', Bakersfield Ca. standing in for Iran.
Part love story, part Gothic horror, and part exercise in style over substance, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a beautiful work of art, but like its blood- sucking heroine, doesn't seem to know quite what it is.Manual labourer Arash (Arash Marandi) spends his life either looking after his heroin-addled father Hossein (Marshall Manesh) or caring for his recently-purchased 1950's car.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night reminded me of the films directed by Jim Jarmusch (it could even be considered a prequel of Only Lovers Left Alive), because it possesses that strange easiness to create realistic characters under very unusual circumstances, and involved into a diffuse and melancholic narrative whose parsimonious rhythm highlights the drama and invites us the explore the deep (and at the same time accessible) subjects.
Amirpour's debut Iranian black and white cowboy vampire movie.Well, it's good.
There are good performances aplenty in A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, and the cinematography is beautiful (being black and white helps), but it's the slow-moving narrative that keeps it from becoming anything other than just another indy vampire flick.
Another example of a poor attempt at art by making the film black and white, the film has no clear direction and is confused in what it wants to be, the western theme and music sticks out like a sore thumb and removes you from the dark/mysterious theme the movie is trying to go for.Acting is subpar,cinematography is decent, all in all this film is a mess with no real merit, I am not sure why this is labeled as horror besides the fact that the girl is a vampire, the film is trying to be different yet the result comes out ultimately pretentious..
"Film-Student Project" Written All Over It. After patiently sitting through "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" - I now pronounce director, Ana Amirpour as being the new "Ed Wood" of Iranian cinema.But, unlike Wood's directorial incompetence - Amirpour's total lack of skill (unfortunately) doesn't offer the viewer a picture that has the essential edge of having unintentional humour on its side.With "Film-Student Project" written all over it - You'd honestly think that Amirpour would have at least tried to present even one of her Iranian characters as being anything else but pure white-trash ('cause one and all were completely Americanized Iranians to the extreme).Containing countless "dead-air" moments and set in a city that seemed to be suspiciously void of any citizens - "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" was a completely anal look at vampires where its zero-charisma bloodsucker was so reckless about satisfying her thirst (showing no concern to conceal her nocturnal activities) that I can't believe some courageous demon-slayer hadn't cut this annoying flake down a long time ago..
The independent film of 2015 that most embodies all the exciting rewards (and, admittedly, limitations) of indie cinema is the audacious and sometimes brilliant "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night", a monochromic black and white movie that can be described as an Iranian vampire western.
Although its dialogue is entirely in the Persian language, in reality it was filmed in southern California (in a mere 24 days) by a young college graduate of UCLA, Ana Lily Amirpour -- a skateboarder born in England from Iranian parents.The setting of the film is an Iranian ghost town called Bad City, a dingy town reeking of loneliness and death, in which a lonely vampire girl dressed in a religious chador mournfully stalks the desperate people of the town, often in search of love more than blood.
What will Arash do?"A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" is a weird black and white American vampire movie spoken in Persian.
As expected the B- Movies mostly had poor production value, needless nudity (usually with just one character who was into that), and overall didn't take themselves seriously and certainly didn't pass themselves off as artsy by making it black and white.A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has all the elements of a B-rated movie, but can't decide whether it wants to be a fun cliché vampire movie, or a social commentary on the topic drug use and prostitution in the Iranian community.
Both Arash and The Girl are so attracted to each other here, and I love it.Honestly, with its incredible black and white cinematography, inspiring commentary on the treatment of women in the Middle East, subtle yet amazing acting, upbeat score, and a really creepy and eerie setting, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is definitely my favorite film as of late.
But then, I haven't seen many black and white Iranian films featuring a skateboarding vampire – or any at all before this, in fact.
Marketed as "the first Iranian Vampire Western," Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is not entirely any of those things.
The movie gets mega points because I'm sure a film with nudity in it like this one would be banned in Iran and the actress beheaded or hung or however they execute people publicly in the Middle East these days.One area I wished they'd work on in "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" is the pacing.
The first thing about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) is that it is filmed in delicious black & white.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) is a highly stylized love story directed by Ana Lily Amirpour.
This instantly visually striking indie-work marks the feature debut of female filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour, whose Iranian heritage and the film's Persian-speaking setting will temptingly make viewers believe it is an Iranian production, but the truth is, it is an out-and-out US indie shot in California, a tale of nihilistic dystopia, but ends up in the unwelcome ennui.Apart from the vampiric girl (Vand), the story loosely surrounds a young man Arash (Morandi), his junkie father Hossein (Manesh), a prostitute Atti (Marnò), a drug dealer Saeed (Rains).