A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT: Every Good Boy Does Fine

March is Women's History Month, which Post-Credit Coda will take as an opportunity for weekly reviews of films by female directors. Of all the reviews I've written in 2+ years, only four and a half of the movies have been directed by women. Women are slooooowly starting to receive better on camera roles in Hollywood, yet the lack of female directors is a continuous blight on the industry. Unskilled and inexperienced men are typically given far grander opportunities while proven, talented women are ignored. Despite the adversity, some women still manage to bring their projects to fruition. Let's hope that in the future this becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour
Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Mozhan Marno, Dominic Rains
Runtime: 101 mins.
2014

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has, first and foremost, a killer title. Amirpour could have easily gone with something bluntly evocative like The Vampire, but instead she went the route of a flashy eight syllable name that makes this movie something of a commitment to bring up in casual conversation. Marketers hate that sort of thing, but as this article about naming conventions suggests, we wouldn't want Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be called The Dream, would we?

The title also perfectly plays upon our preconceived notions. When presented with the image of a girl walking home alone at night, especially in the context of a horror movie, we assume she will be the victim of some perverse attack. Every signifier in that string of words is meant to evoke vulnerability. The joke's on us, though. In this movie the girl is the aggressor, the shadowy figure out for blood.

A Girl Walks is a Persian-language vampire film about a godforsaken Iranian town known as Bad City. Bad things happen in Bad City. The film opens on perhaps its most iconic sequence: a man walking through the town and casually crossing over a trench littered with corpses. We then meet the man's father, a hopeless junkie, as well as the pimp and dealer who is ruining his life for profit. The rest of the narrative functions as a pastiche of these and a few other characters moving in and out of each other's lives, and having encounters with a dark and sinister female figure. She's a vampire.

As you might guess by the set-up, there is a very potent anti-patriarchal thematic current beneath the events of the film. The Girl (as she is named in the script) acts as a vengeful force against the evils of Bad City. "Are you a good boy, or not?" she asks in one of her rare spoken lines of dialogue. She doesn't attack arbitrarily, she attacks ethically--though it is clear this behavior stems from a deep-seated guilt about her own fundamental carnal nature. There are no heroes in Bad City, and everybody is a villain after their own fashion, though that doesn't make their arcs any less meaningful or sympathetic. The systematic and social corruption on display makes A Girl Walks something of a gothic neo-noir, which is just about the coolest.

Another great thing about that title is that it clues you into what you will spend most of the movie watching: people walking around at night. This alone will make A Girl Walks unpalatable to a wide swathe of audience members. It will strike them as boring, or meandering. I am very much not a member of that swathe. The deliberate, crawling pace of this film is like slowly getting steamrolled. It's shot in black and white, and the way bodies move through shadows as the music pounds--or disappears--sends the audience into a trancelike state. It has the effect of watching the carnage of a trainwreck at 1/1000th speed. You know something awful and destructive is looming, but you can't tear your attention away as the crisis inches forward. I can only really compare this experience to that of watching Nicholas Winding Refn's* Only God Forgives, or to a lesser extent Drive. Amirpour and Refn have in common a gift for excruciating patience of the kind we are unused to in American cinema.

*Coincidentally, Refn's next movie is a vampire film called The Neon Demon.

In reading about Amirpour I stumbled upon a quote that likened her to Tarantino. My first impulse was to scoff, as Tarantino is such a singular and distinctive talent. But the longer I considered, the more I thought there might be some truth to the comparison. Amirpour demonstrates the same level of exacting control over the action. They both excel at ratcheting up tension. Perhaps the main difference is that Tarantino's primary tool is often dialogue, and much of A Girl Walks is told in measured silences and stylized gestures.

It's clear that the two creators also share pop sensibilities, inspired needle drops, and a unique brand of unbridled enthusiasm for their work. Read a few quotes from Amirpour about her next movie** and see how hard it is not to imagine Tarantino's bright-eyed, borderline maniacal gesticulations. Amirpour exudes life, and she does what she does because she thinks it's cool, but A Girl Walks proves that even in her very first feature film, she has a firm grasp on how to give everything a deeply meaningful undercurrent. She is absolutely a director to pay close attention to in the years to come.

**A film called The Bad Batch, a post-apocalyptic cannibal love story, starring Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey, and Jason Momoa...

4.5 / 5  BLOBS