14.4 SCREENING: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

SCREENING: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Industrial decay in Bay City

In A Girl, actress Sheila Vand plays the vampire and does well as the lonesome soldier manning the streets of this sinful abandoned ghost city. Through her vigilantes, she stumbles upon Arash, who is not just any ordinary boy: he is the model of what she is fighting for.

Poster for A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night


The film is interestingly conceived and draws from various schools, most notably film noir for the sense of dread found throughout the movie. Mostly shot at nighttime, the black and white shots symbolize the ambiance of the sins that transpire in the dark, barren and moribund city space that we have inherited from the ills of our post industrialized world.

Director and writer Ana Lily Amirpour describes the film as “the first Iranian vampire spaghetti western” and has her own life experience smeared all over it. Born to Iranian parents in England and then moving to Florida and later California to make the United States her home, Amirpour’s A Girl is that self-styled, worldview critique of women and their place, always seen through the male gaze.

The most memorable moment in the film is when on her hunt for perpetrators the Girl meets this young boy no older than ten, and asks him if he has been a good boy. The boy acknowledges that he has and the Girl warns him that she will be watching him, throughout his life to make sure that he doesn’t falter. Amirpour’s poignant critique of how they need to be caught young to make sure that innocence isn’t corrupted by ideas of masculinity, patriarchy, and misogyny and is pointing fingers at the world and how we are letting it all go awry. It takes the Girl hiding behind her vampire cloak and her fangs to suck the blood out of this perpetual cycle of violence, quite literally.

- Sinji Karan, "Review of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night:  (Links to an external site.)
60s film noir and vampire vengence," Montreal Rampage

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