Iranian Vampire Western ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night’ Is Screening Around Australia, And It’s Brilliant

Vampires and Western themes are pretty much guaranteed as the two elements of culture that will never go out of style. And if style is your thing, then Ana Lily Amirpour’s self-proclaimed “Iranian vampire Western” is going to be one of the best films you see this year.

Released in America late last year, and currently enjoying a select few screenings around Australia, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night loosely observes the Western template: two wandering protagonists come together to conquer their foe, and leave in search of a better life. The plot isn’t really what matters though; this film’s achievement is its atmosphere. Built from a trove of film and musical content, it goes well beyond pastiche thanks to Amirpour’s innovation as writer and director: she doesn’t mock nostalgia, or grieve it; she embraces it.

After premiering at Sundance in 2014, the film was picked up by Vice Films, whose Creative Director described Amirpour as “the next Tarantino”. It’s an apt comparison. Some have criticised Tarantino for having no original ideas, but his films also went beyond pastiche; the director experimented with content, editing, and temporal format, changing the way audiences watched and identified with films.

Watching A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, it’s a lot of fun to trainspot the genre nods, but they shouldn’t distract from what is a seriously accomplished feature debut, and one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve seen in recent years. Amirpour says the secret is sticking to your guns: “When you do that you can create culture, but I think a lot of movies are just echoing culture and there’s a difference.”

Intertextuality And Beyond

References abound in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, some of which Amirpour has spoken about openly. The film begins with an image reminiscent of George Stevens’ Giant (1956): Arash (Arash Marandi), wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, leans casually against to a slatted wooden fence. He could be James Dean’s Jett Rink, a lost cowboy on a ranch in Texas. The lines of the desert corral could be the lines of Rink’s weatherboard shack, that Dean leans on with the same inattention, the same short sleeves, the same cigarette, the same belt with its metal tip adornment.

The first female close-up could almost be Theda Bara in the 1915 Fox film A Fool There Was; Mozhan Marnò as The Prostitute has her lips, eyes and hair just as Bara did. It is perhaps Bara’s most famous film — one of her only movies that still exist in full — and the first canonised appearance of the “vamp” figure. At 100 years old, it’s one of the purest vampire references out there.

And then there’s the scenery. Filmed in an isolated area in California, Bad City’s oil derricks recall the Mexican oilfields of Blowing Wild (Hugo Fregonese, 1953), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), and any number of noirs and Westerns from their ruling decades. The sets exude the smooth hypnotism of Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), and the irrepressible cool of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961), with its dry, isolated areas dominated by masculine bravado, diffused by the presence of a languorous, enchanting woman.

Despite being the title character, The Girl — played by a bewitching Sheila Vand — is on the periphery for much of the film, but she makes an impact from the shadows. “I’m bad,” she tells a frightened young boy, then steals his skateboard. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night would probably fail the Bechdel test (which evaluates a film by asking if it features at least one scene where two women talk to each other, about something other than a man), but in cases like this, that gauge is limited at best. There are no damsels in distress here. This is a film about a mysterious, taciturn, century-old teen, who wears her black chador like a cape, and she is in charge of her own life. Or unlife, because she’s undead.

A Feature-Length Film Clip

After meeting Amirpour at ComicCon, Margaret Atwood – the reigning queen of feminist literature — posed as Madonna for one of the posters lining The Girl’s apartment walls. A collection of the director’s friends posed in replicas of other musicians’ and bands’ posters, including co-executive producer Elijah Wood. There’s no Madonna on the soundtrack, but there’s a lot of great music, with grandiose trumpets and guitars that recall past Western soundtracks, and moments that nod to Yasmine Hamdan’s performance in the finale of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive.

One standout scene occurs in a horror-themed nightclub, where everyone is dressed up — perhaps it’s Halloween. One partygoer sports a Ronald Reagan mask, because that face is always terrifying (I can’t find a screenshot, but someone wears one to the party in Donnie Darko, too). A friend, The Rich Girl (Rome Shadanloo), offers Arash MDMA; he refuses at first, but succumbs to her plea that, “This pill is nothing without you. It needs you.” It’s like Mercutio circling around Romeo in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). Luhrmann just celebrated the re-release of that soundtrack on blue vinyl; like that film A Girl Walks Home Alone seems in part like a feature-length music video, dictated by rhythm. It’s telling that the gross pimp, Saeed (Dominic Rains), plays his crass techno CDs on a stereo, but The Girl owns a record player; records clearly win.

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Screening Dates and Venues:

Sydney: Golden Age Cinema on Thursday Feb 19 and Wednesday Feb 25 – tickets here

Brisbane: Schonelle Theatre, University of Queensland, playing all week — tickets here

Melbourne: Cinema Nova, Carlton, from February 19 — more info here

Adelaide: Mercury Cinema on Thursday February 26 — tickets here

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Eloise Ross is a writer and academic. She works for the Melbourne Cinémathèque. Follow her on Twitter @EloiseLoRoss