A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night 2014

What is it about Vampire movies that keep drawing us to them. I usually check out most of the new ones (the exception being the Twilight franchise which I have no interest in) including this one, a first feature by the young female director Ana Lily Amirpour a Iranian by birth but brought up in Los Angles. I had no notion about the subject of the film but was drawn to it by its title (the best title of 2014) and when I found out what it was about I said to myself “oh no not another vampire movie.” This is certainly a curious one, set in a run down city in Iran called Bad City the film was actually filmed in down and out parts of L.A. in  beautiful inky black and white cinematography. The characters speak Farsi (there are subtitles)  which adds to the sense of dislocation and dread. Where are we and what are we doing here? The lone and lonely vampire is a young attractive woman who seems to pick her victims on moral grounds. A nasty drug dealer and a pimp goes out in a very painful and graphic scene but a young boy is spared with the warning from the vampire that he had better be a good boy and that she will be watching him for the rest of his life to make sure and a worn and weary prostitute is befriend by her. The film of course takes place mostly at night and there are some beautiful nocturnal scenes and images among them the vampire in her traditional chudda blowing in the breeze skateboarding down a deserted street, a drug out costume party where the young handsome lead comes as Dracula and later bombed out on ecstasy stands transfixed before a streetlamp as the vampire watches him and a drag queen dancing alone in the street with a balloon. Influenced by many genres including westerns both traditional and the spaghetti kind, (the music score is strongly influenced by Ennio Morricone and by Jim Jarmusch and the low budget Val Lewton horror films of the 40’s. Much of the plot is left unexplained and the dialogue is kept at a minimal but the style, eroticism   and imagination of the film should keep viewers transfixed, and then there is that title.