By Afroditi A. Karagianni,
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is not your typical Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer-ish vampire story. More specifically, this alternative Iranian film –directed by Ana Lily Amirpour in 2014– tells the story of a lonesome female vampire (Sheila Vand) who inhabits Bad City (an Iranian ghost-town) and explores themes of love, longing, addiction, poverty, self-destruction, connection and loneliness under an impressively imaginative light.
Although a seemingly cold-blooded executor who by night slanders the men who she deems unethical or knows have committed crimes, the vampire’s loneliness, melancholy and desperate need for connection can be seen in her gleaming, enormous eyes. The days seem to just pass her by, when one night, everything changes. Arash (Arash Marandi), a hard-working, humble, lower-class man who lives with his addict father and their cat in their family home stumbles upon her, and the rest is history. Arash desperately tries to get to know her, the girl is torn between protecting her identity and letting herself express her infatuation towards him and they are soon caught in a whirlwind of emotions, where fleeting moments of closeness followed by deliberate emotional distancing from both blur the lines of their relationship.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night presents as the unexpected combination of romance and horror genre elements, and its overall tone is impressively maintained through its black and white filter, long continuous shots, and suspenseful yet sorrowful musical pieces scattered across the film. Despite isolation and death being what the town reeks of, the two protagonists manage to formulate a rather special connection in it, which only grows over time and is a testament to their individual character growth throughout the course of the story. Despite the hardships that may appear in their separate lives and The Girl’s confessions concerning some “terrible things she has done” to Arash, one can witness the growing vulnerability and affection between the two, for instance when they are slow dancing or simply looking in each other’s eyes, a fact that hints to the vitality of acceptance, honesty and support existing in modern day relationships. Simultaneously, this film is a bone chilling thriller, where vampires have never been more terrifying and the scare it offers is being achieved in highly inventive and unique ways.
An alternative, contemporary horror film like this one should be paid attention to. Not only does it manage to profoundly frighten one with its eerie and unsettling atmosphere, but it also discusses topics like addiction, companionship, human nature, abuse, ethics, poverty, love and self-destruction in a creative, yet vulnerable and raw way. Ultimately, one thing is for certain though, and that is none other than that romance might not be dead, but multiple Iranian men sure are.
Reference
- A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). IMDB.com. Available here
