Review: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - Not your average spooky vampire love story
Back in November, I saw a screening of Empire of Passion at the Siskel Film Center. Based on the description, I got the impression that it was going to be a romance with thriller elements, a story of how love can drive people to self-destruction. But by about midway through the movie, I realized that it wasn't really it. At its heart, it was really a horror movie which just happened to involve two people having sex. And once I realized it, I was able to enjoy it a lot more.
When I started hearing about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, I got an impression that it was a spooky film about a vampire girl in an Iranian ghost town. And those elements were certainly present in the movie. But it wasn't that long before I realized that it's not what the movie actually was.
And what it was was something quite a bit more interesting. Something that's harder to pin down.
In a industrial Iranian city everybody calls "Bad City," residents are trying to either find something better or squeeze the most joy out whatever lot in life they were left with. A young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) does house work for a local oligarch to save up money for a nice car, while pining for the oligarch's spoiled but pretty daughter. His father (Marshall Manash) is lost in a drug-induced haze. Atti (Mozhan Marno), local prostitute wonders what's going to happen to her as she get closer and closer to middle age. A street urchin is just trying to survive. Saeed (Dominic Rains), a local crime lord relishes the power money and intimidation brings. And watching them all is a quiet, spooky girl in a black chador (Sheila Vand), looking for a evil beings to prey upon.
She watches as Saeed takes Arash's car to cover his father's debts. The Girl (her name is never mentioned) kills the crime lord, and Arash steals his stash of money and drugs, giving him access to the underground parties his crush frequents. But Arash soon discovers that money only goes so far. In drug-induced haze, he stumbles across the vampire girl - and a strange romance quickly develops, even as the girl continues to look for people who deserve to be killed.
As I said earlier, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has legitimately spooky elements. The way The Girl stalks and toys with her prey is genuinely unsettling, in a way that doesn't require anything supernatural. The film slowly builds dread as we watch the girl consider whether to kill and drain this particular person. The scenes where she actually attacks her prey have the shocking,raw, animistic viciousness that reminded me of the Swedish adaptation of Let the Right One In. There were times when I felt the soundtrack got a bit too bombastic, ruining the atmosphere, but the scenes that were supposed to be frightening worked far, far more often than they didn't.
But unlike Let the Right One In's Eli, who may have been human at some point but who did not behave quite like a human girl, this film's female lead is quite recognizably human. She listens to records of Western artists. She lazies around in the bathtub. She blushes when a cute guy gets close to her. When she kills Saeed, she steals his CDs along with some jewelry. And one gets a sense that she enjoys her spooky act. There's a scene where she rides a skateboard, holding the edges of her chador out so it flaps in the wind like a cape, and you can practically hear her making the whooshing noises.
(You just know she was making them in her head)
I love the scene where she first met Arash. As she skates past the stoned young man in a home-made Dracula costume, you can practically hear her thought process.
"What the hell? Okay, this is weird. Let's check it out. Okay, I'm being spooky. Why isn't he freaking out? Why is he so happy, this isn't the way it's supposed to...Why is he hugging me? Why am I enjoying it!"
It's actually quiet interesting how the gilm manages to depict its female protagonist as a spooky, calculating predator and a love-struck, shy girl in a way where they both come across as two different parts of the same personality rather than character inconsistency. It's something that could very easily have fallen apart, but it doesn't. The credit should go to both the script and Vand's expressive, nuanced performance.
Speaking of performances, other actors are also pretty good, giving dimension and nuance to what could've very easily been flat parts. Marandi plays Arash as a decent, somewhat idealistic young man - but not so idealistic that he's above stealing jewelry to try to get his car back, or taking Saeed's stash while the crime lord is bleeding out. You could see why The Girl fell for him - Marandi makes the character quietly charming and caring. Marshall Manash plays Arash's father as a broken man - and while it's clear that his vices (drugs, prostitutes and gambling), we get a sense that he probably wasn't exactly a saint even when he was young and sober. Mozhan Marno makes Atti a tragic figure, even when she's being ruthlessly pragmatic. Especially when she's being ruthlessly pramatic. Dominic Rains plays Saeed with quiet menace - you get a sense why other characters are afraid of him even when he sounds calm and reasonable. Yet you also get hints of vulnerability, a desire to be liked that comes through when he tries to pick up The Girl.
The production staff also do impressive work. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was shot in black-and-white, which is great for a spooky film that also involves crime and romance. There are some great night scenes, with the blacks and contrasts used to great effect, in a way that wouldn't be possible with colored film. The film was actually shot in a town in California, and at times where the film doesn't quite disguise it (I don't know much about Iranian architecture, but some of the buildings in Bad City look a bit too distinctly American). But the film manages to establish the setting well enough that it's fairly easy to overlook that.
I would be remiss not to give credit to director and writer Ana Lily Amirpour. The big reason why the suspenseful scenes work was that she was able to pace the scenes well, to build suspense slowly without slowing the movie down. And while the actors do a great job of giving their characters dimension, the characters as they were written on the page already seemed complex.
Watching the movie, I wondered Amirpour's depiction of her homeland. Did Iran had drug dealers, or prostitutes. I could buy an underground discoteque where the children or the rich and the powerful do drugs - in any authoritarian country, the elite gets a certain degree of immunity from the restrictions the rest of the population is placed under. But I would've figured that a conservative government built around a religious ideology would crack down on vices.
Afterwords, I did some research and discovered that both drugs and prostitution were growing issues in Iran - partially due to bribery and partially due to the government's unwilliness to confront those issues (because drugs and sex trade are Western issues, you see, and they can't possibly have them in an Islamic republic). So while I'm not entirely sure that the movie is 100 percent accurate, I got a sense that there's more truth to that then I would've previously thought.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night isn't entirely perfect. As I said earlier, I questioned some soundtrack issues. And I do wish we'd learn more about The Girl. How did she feel about being a vampire? What powers did she have? While we see her hunting a lot, we never get to see if it's something she has to do to get the blood or something she wants to do to rid her town of bad people. Because the answer to that could change the movie quite a bit.
But, in the end, the movie works. It's a spooky, complex and occasionally tender piece that jumps back and forth between genres in a way that feels organic and natural - which is pretty difficult to pull off. Even if you don't watch horror, or anything that has vampires, I would recommend checking it out.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night will be playing at Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center on February 20-26. For other cities... check out this page.
When I started hearing about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, I got an impression that it was a spooky film about a vampire girl in an Iranian ghost town. And those elements were certainly present in the movie. But it wasn't that long before I realized that it's not what the movie actually was.
And what it was was something quite a bit more interesting. Something that's harder to pin down.
In a industrial Iranian city everybody calls "Bad City," residents are trying to either find something better or squeeze the most joy out whatever lot in life they were left with. A young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) does house work for a local oligarch to save up money for a nice car, while pining for the oligarch's spoiled but pretty daughter. His father (Marshall Manash) is lost in a drug-induced haze. Atti (Mozhan Marno), local prostitute wonders what's going to happen to her as she get closer and closer to middle age. A street urchin is just trying to survive. Saeed (Dominic Rains), a local crime lord relishes the power money and intimidation brings. And watching them all is a quiet, spooky girl in a black chador (Sheila Vand), looking for a evil beings to prey upon.
She watches as Saeed takes Arash's car to cover his father's debts. The Girl (her name is never mentioned) kills the crime lord, and Arash steals his stash of money and drugs, giving him access to the underground parties his crush frequents. But Arash soon discovers that money only goes so far. In drug-induced haze, he stumbles across the vampire girl - and a strange romance quickly develops, even as the girl continues to look for people who deserve to be killed.
As I said earlier, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has legitimately spooky elements. The way The Girl stalks and toys with her prey is genuinely unsettling, in a way that doesn't require anything supernatural. The film slowly builds dread as we watch the girl consider whether to kill and drain this particular person. The scenes where she actually attacks her prey have the shocking,raw, animistic viciousness that reminded me of the Swedish adaptation of Let the Right One In. There were times when I felt the soundtrack got a bit too bombastic, ruining the atmosphere, but the scenes that were supposed to be frightening worked far, far more often than they didn't.
But unlike Let the Right One In's Eli, who may have been human at some point but who did not behave quite like a human girl, this film's female lead is quite recognizably human. She listens to records of Western artists. She lazies around in the bathtub. She blushes when a cute guy gets close to her. When she kills Saeed, she steals his CDs along with some jewelry. And one gets a sense that she enjoys her spooky act. There's a scene where she rides a skateboard, holding the edges of her chador out so it flaps in the wind like a cape, and you can practically hear her making the whooshing noises.
(You just know she was making them in her head)
I love the scene where she first met Arash. As she skates past the stoned young man in a home-made Dracula costume, you can practically hear her thought process.
"What the hell? Okay, this is weird. Let's check it out. Okay, I'm being spooky. Why isn't he freaking out? Why is he so happy, this isn't the way it's supposed to...Why is he hugging me? Why am I enjoying it!"
It's actually quiet interesting how the gilm manages to depict its female protagonist as a spooky, calculating predator and a love-struck, shy girl in a way where they both come across as two different parts of the same personality rather than character inconsistency. It's something that could very easily have fallen apart, but it doesn't. The credit should go to both the script and Vand's expressive, nuanced performance.
Speaking of performances, other actors are also pretty good, giving dimension and nuance to what could've very easily been flat parts. Marandi plays Arash as a decent, somewhat idealistic young man - but not so idealistic that he's above stealing jewelry to try to get his car back, or taking Saeed's stash while the crime lord is bleeding out. You could see why The Girl fell for him - Marandi makes the character quietly charming and caring. Marshall Manash plays Arash's father as a broken man - and while it's clear that his vices (drugs, prostitutes and gambling), we get a sense that he probably wasn't exactly a saint even when he was young and sober. Mozhan Marno makes Atti a tragic figure, even when she's being ruthlessly pragmatic. Especially when she's being ruthlessly pramatic. Dominic Rains plays Saeed with quiet menace - you get a sense why other characters are afraid of him even when he sounds calm and reasonable. Yet you also get hints of vulnerability, a desire to be liked that comes through when he tries to pick up The Girl.
The production staff also do impressive work. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was shot in black-and-white, which is great for a spooky film that also involves crime and romance. There are some great night scenes, with the blacks and contrasts used to great effect, in a way that wouldn't be possible with colored film. The film was actually shot in a town in California, and at times where the film doesn't quite disguise it (I don't know much about Iranian architecture, but some of the buildings in Bad City look a bit too distinctly American). But the film manages to establish the setting well enough that it's fairly easy to overlook that.
I would be remiss not to give credit to director and writer Ana Lily Amirpour. The big reason why the suspenseful scenes work was that she was able to pace the scenes well, to build suspense slowly without slowing the movie down. And while the actors do a great job of giving their characters dimension, the characters as they were written on the page already seemed complex.
Watching the movie, I wondered Amirpour's depiction of her homeland. Did Iran had drug dealers, or prostitutes. I could buy an underground discoteque where the children or the rich and the powerful do drugs - in any authoritarian country, the elite gets a certain degree of immunity from the restrictions the rest of the population is placed under. But I would've figured that a conservative government built around a religious ideology would crack down on vices.
Afterwords, I did some research and discovered that both drugs and prostitution were growing issues in Iran - partially due to bribery and partially due to the government's unwilliness to confront those issues (because drugs and sex trade are Western issues, you see, and they can't possibly have them in an Islamic republic). So while I'm not entirely sure that the movie is 100 percent accurate, I got a sense that there's more truth to that then I would've previously thought.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night isn't entirely perfect. As I said earlier, I questioned some soundtrack issues. And I do wish we'd learn more about The Girl. How did she feel about being a vampire? What powers did she have? While we see her hunting a lot, we never get to see if it's something she has to do to get the blood or something she wants to do to rid her town of bad people. Because the answer to that could change the movie quite a bit.
But, in the end, the movie works. It's a spooky, complex and occasionally tender piece that jumps back and forth between genres in a way that feels organic and natural - which is pretty difficult to pull off. Even if you don't watch horror, or anything that has vampires, I would recommend checking it out.
Click to viewA Girl Walks Home Alone at Night will be playing at Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center on February 20-26. For other cities... check out this page.