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#498 - A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014
The inhabitants of a small Iranian town are haunted by a female vampire.
Considering how oversaturated the vampire sub-genre has become in recent years, if a work of fiction is going to feature the world's favourite blood-sucking creature of myth then it has to provide a unique take on the subject for better or worse. Arthouse favourite Jim Jarmusch already decided to make a film about vampires with 2013's Only Lovers Left Alive, though he did so by creating a film full of stark colours and jagged post-rock as befitting his most recently developed style of filmmaking. 2014's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, on the other hand, is easy to compare to the style of Jarmusch's early films with its black-and-white photography, retro soundtrack, and barely-connected vignettes featuring a small collection of odd characters. As a result, the film has a fairly decent visual aesthetic as it slowly burns its way through a fairly brief running time, but unfortunately it doesn't have all that much in the way in substance. The film's main character is a young man named Arash, who has to put his goals on hold in order to care for his drug-addicted father, which naturally means doing whatever it takes to pay off the local dealer/pimp. Enter the mysterious girl of the title, a vampire who roams the town at night and occasionally picks someone to feed upon, whose path directly or indirectly converges with Arash's several times over the course of the movie.
While the monochromatic look of the film is a nice choice and the soundtrack is also pretty good, there's ultimately not a lot to seriously distinguish A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night from other arthouse vampire films. The Iranian setting (and the pervasive influence of Western culture upon it) does provide an interesting subtext to the characters, most notably through the Girl's trademark outfit that combines a headscarf and cloak with tomboyish Western clothes as she skateboards around or listens to disco records. One can also pick up a coming-of-age narrative for Arash as he pushes through a number of hardships and foolhardy decisions, though that doesn't end up being all that interesting even with the introduction of a vampire to help shake things up. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the Girl could qualify as a "manic pixie dream girl" underneath her frequently silent and dangerously foreboding persona. That would certainly explain why the Girl's own arc isn't too interesting either; she's established as a "good" vampire of sorts (her on-screen victims tend to be bad people and she chooses to scare a child off rather than feed on him), but there doesn't seem to be much reason given as to why she suddenly takes interest in Arash. The story is superficially unpredictable enough that you never quite know where it's going to end up right until the credits roll, but it takes its time getting there and the twists don't feel all that shocking. As it stands, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is pretty middle-of-the-road as far as vampire films go, but I give it points for trying.
Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014
The inhabitants of a small Iranian town are haunted by a female vampire.
Considering how oversaturated the vampire sub-genre has become in recent years, if a work of fiction is going to feature the world's favourite blood-sucking creature of myth then it has to provide a unique take on the subject for better or worse. Arthouse favourite Jim Jarmusch already decided to make a film about vampires with 2013's Only Lovers Left Alive, though he did so by creating a film full of stark colours and jagged post-rock as befitting his most recently developed style of filmmaking. 2014's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, on the other hand, is easy to compare to the style of Jarmusch's early films with its black-and-white photography, retro soundtrack, and barely-connected vignettes featuring a small collection of odd characters. As a result, the film has a fairly decent visual aesthetic as it slowly burns its way through a fairly brief running time, but unfortunately it doesn't have all that much in the way in substance. The film's main character is a young man named Arash, who has to put his goals on hold in order to care for his drug-addicted father, which naturally means doing whatever it takes to pay off the local dealer/pimp. Enter the mysterious girl of the title, a vampire who roams the town at night and occasionally picks someone to feed upon, whose path directly or indirectly converges with Arash's several times over the course of the movie.
While the monochromatic look of the film is a nice choice and the soundtrack is also pretty good, there's ultimately not a lot to seriously distinguish A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night from other arthouse vampire films. The Iranian setting (and the pervasive influence of Western culture upon it) does provide an interesting subtext to the characters, most notably through the Girl's trademark outfit that combines a headscarf and cloak with tomboyish Western clothes as she skateboards around or listens to disco records. One can also pick up a coming-of-age narrative for Arash as he pushes through a number of hardships and foolhardy decisions, though that doesn't end up being all that interesting even with the introduction of a vampire to help shake things up. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the Girl could qualify as a "manic pixie dream girl" underneath her frequently silent and dangerously foreboding persona. That would certainly explain why the Girl's own arc isn't too interesting either; she's established as a "good" vampire of sorts (her on-screen victims tend to be bad people and she chooses to scare a child off rather than feed on him), but there doesn't seem to be much reason given as to why she suddenly takes interest in Arash. The story is superficially unpredictable enough that you never quite know where it's going to end up right until the credits roll, but it takes its time getting there and the twists don't feel all that shocking. As it stands, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is pretty middle-of-the-road as far as vampire films go, but I give it points for trying.