Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps, and other sordid souls, is a place that reeks of death and hopelessness, where a lonely vampire is stalking the town’s most unsavory inhabitants. But when the boy meets a girl, an unusual love story begins to blossom…blood red.
The first Iranian Vampire Western, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night basks in the sheer pleasure of pulp. A joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave.
Amped by a mix of Iranian rock, techno, and Morricone-inspired riffs, its airy, anamorphic, black-and-white aesthetic and artfully drawn-out scenes combine the simmering tension of Sergio Leone with the surrealism of David Lynch.
USA, 2014, 99 min, 4K DCP, Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, Unrated, Farsi with English Subtitles, Kino Lorber
“Even as Ms. Amirpour draws heavily from various bodies of work with vampire like hunger, she gives her influences new life by channeling them through other cultural forms, including her chador-cloaked vampire..” —The New York Times
“Ana Lily Amirpour’s feature debut could become a totem for a hipster world mad for jukebox funkiness, vampires, and gender-politics righteousness.” —Village Voice
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