Revel in Ana Lily Amirpour‘s ‘Bad City’ where the luscious chiaroscuro of depravity meets style and substance in the first ‘Iranian vampire western’ -coined by the UCLA graduate with her feature directorial debut. Like a deconstructed horror film, “AGWHAAN” glides across a spectrum of genres in a way that presents some incredibly visceral iconography that feels eerily familiar but also hauntingly avant-garde all at once.
In the stillness of the night, Arash (Arash Marandi) toils to make ends meet supporting the ills of his heroin-addicted father Hossein (Marshall Manesh). A clash with the village ne’er-do-well, Saeed (Dominic Rains proving the point with the word ‘sex’ tattooed on his neck), leaves the former without his car as payment for the arrears Hossein owed the drug dealers. After obtaining some jewellery in unscrupulous ways, Arash seeks out the drug-dealing wise guy to get his car back, only to find the man dead, sans a finger and bleeding from a puncture wound to his neck. He is unaware of the dealings carried out by the chador-wearing vampire girl (Sheila Vand) who flees the building as he enters.
Even from its title, the film proves to be a cleverly made production with many fresh takes on two of film history’s oldest genres- horror and western. A girl walks home alone, but in this ‘horror-noir’, she is not the meek and hopeless victim you conjure in your mind but alas, becomes the hunter instead. The biting (no pun intended) reveal of her vampiric status is tense and shockingly graphic in a scene that is so effective yet simply executed. Much of the film is indeed muted. From the director’s trademark thinness of dialogue in her works (noteworthy as Ana has 30% hearing loss) to Lyle Vincent’s play of shadows and black and whites paying homage to past greats like maestro F. W. Murnau’s legendary Nosferatu (1922) and neo-noir Sin City (2005).
But this quietness caresses the senses and forces the viewer to focus on what is transpiring on screen without distraction. A simple scene of the girl walking down the alleyway as a lone figure immediately feels more disturbing and pressing, and then it goes for the jugular with the usual horror elements that startle and shock. While also throwing the curveball of a brewing love story between Arash and the girl into the mix.
“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” does lose some steam in the euphoric haze of narcotics towards the second act, but the slow-burning creature feature continues to linger and exert its tendrils of darkness- from the bedroom where the girl listens to 80s Madonna pop to her feeding ground, on the likes of the odd nightwalker or geriatric. Eliciting a disturbing sense of dread and morose air that makes this not only a ghoulishly fascinating watch but a step in the right direction for female directors in the male-dominated arena of horror-filmmaking.
