Review - 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night'

Here's a different kind of meet-cute: She's a real-life (real-death?) vampire, he's a mere mortal dressed as Dracula, fake fangs and cowl. They're at a costume party. Their eyes lock. The music rumbles. They move closer.

If Ana Lily Amirpour has her way - and why shouldn't she?; she's the director - the couple will drive off into the moonlight together. But stuff could happen to thwart them in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Drug dealers and junkies, pimps and hookers abound. There's a pit where corpses lie. She has her urges, her thirst. And there is the fact that he dresses like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and drives a vintage Thunderbird. The walking dead (and the walking living) could find it annoying.

Amirpour, an Iranian American making her cool, supremely confident feature debut, found a spooky California sprawl of low-slung stucco buildings and storm-fenced yards and turned it into "Bad City" - a Middle Eastern ghost town pocked with sordid denizens, stray cats, and signs in Farsi. Arash (Arash Marandi) lives here, striking those Jim Stark poses and working hard. His father (Marshall Manesh) is a gambler, an addict in debt to the town's tattooed mover of merchandise (Dominic Rains), who works a prostitute, supplies heroin and ecstasy, and takes Arash's T-Bird as payment for all the cash his tired dad owes.

Meanwhile, the Girl (Sheila Vand), in black chador (with a fashionable striped French sailor shirt underneath), prowls around, worrying kids on skateboards and winos bent sideways in the alleys. Did we say A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is shot in black and white? It is. Like vintage Jim Jarmusch, or David Lynch's Eraserhead.

Amirpour clearly studied their films and listened to some Sergio Leone spaghetti Western scores while she was at it. The music in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night pulses with a late-night Persian vibe, reverby and twanging, soulful, hypnotic.

Amirpour published a graphic novel, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night: Death Is the Answer, to fill in the backstory her movie heroine lacks. But in some ways, the meeting of the Girl and Arash, strangers to each other and to us, feels just enough: a moment in time and space, in a place whose ghostly creatures would be terribly frightening if they weren't so terribly beautiful.

Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour. With Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Dominic Rains, Marshall Manesh. In Farsi with subtitles. Distributed by Kino Lorber.

Running time: 1 hour, 39 mins.

Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (violence, horror, adult themes).

Playing at: Ritz Bourse.EndText