A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Like a mosa­ic of shim­mer­ing frag­ments that do not com­pose a big­ger pic­ture, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut fea­ture brims with stylised qual­i­ties that have been pri­ori­tised over sto­ry and char­ac­ters. We’re in ​‘Bad City’, Iran, the black-and-white, filmed-in-Cal­i­for­nia ver­sion. Automa­tons pump and steam bil­lows in the back­ground while arche­types walk desert­ed streets, foot­steps echo­ing like those of cow­boys head­ing towards pis­tols at dawn.

Arash (Arash Maran­di) looks like an Iran­ian James Dean, or maybe a Levi’s advert. He worked 2,191 days to buy a nice jalopy, only for it to be snatched by Saeed (Dominic Rains), a drug baron/​pimp with ​‘SEX’ tat­tooed across his neck. Arash’s dad is a patri­arch hol­lowed out by hero­in but still endowed with a nasty edge. Street­walk­er Atti (Mozhan Marnò) feels the worst of his crum­bling pow­er. Watch­ing over all is The Girl (Sheila Vand), a vam­pire whose func­tion is to shake-up the gen­der sta­tus quo using her fangs. And that’s the sto­ry – give or take a numbly enact­ed romance.

To be fair to Amir­pour, she’s not gun­ning for straight sto­ry­telling and has delib­er­ate­ly fash­ioned a film that aims to play with genre ideas. The crit­i­cal prob­lem is there is no ener­gy in the play­ing. Scenes are slow to the point of sta­sis. The only pulse comes from sat­is­fy­ing, eclec­tic music selec­tions: haunt­ing east­ern strings, elec­tron­i­ca and Ser­gio Leone-style chorals. 

The Girl invites Arash back to her house and puts on a record by a post-punk band from Eal­ing. What unfolds as the song plays out is basi­cal­ly a beau­ti­ful music video, com­plete with dis­co ball, as two kohl-eyed humans come togeth­er in the cool lair of a post-mod­ern vamp. It’s a slick pose and not much more.