A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
If “the first Iranian vampire Western” doesn’t pique your interest, I fear nothing will. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a beautiful subversion of the traditional life of a woman in Iran—a young vampire woman with a taste for bad men (literally) can freely roam the streets at night, because she is the danger in the dark. She begins to interfere in the life of a young man struggling to take care of his addict father who has gotten them into a pickle with a local drug dealer—the more she interferes, the more it’s clear that she’s no typical woman, but does that matter?
The film, clearly inspired by Sergio Leone and spaghetti Westerns as well as the original Nosferatu, is beautifully shot and well-acted, taking the familiar genres and turning them upside down and inside out by melding them with a bold, graphic novel-esque visual style. — AM
