Give Me Your Hand - "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)"

Recently I learned about a film called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, described by its creator as an "Iranian vampire Western fairy tale."  Like any person of sound mind, my reaction was "Sign me the hell up."  I rented it a few weekends ago and then immediately purchased it on Blu-ray.

Obviously I really, really like this movie.

It's a stark, quiet, and beautifully shot film that YouTube video essayist Joshua Mobley describes as "a modern day Gothic horror story."  Like most Gothic horror, it's more creepy and unsettling than outright scary and It has a lonely melancholy about it that I find very compelling.

In addition to having an unusual setting it also subverts expectations for vampire media in that it's a sort of love story between a female vampire and a young male protagonist.

You should definitely watch this movie.

Background

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a 2014 film written and directed by Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour.  It is entirely in Farsi and stars an Iranian-American cast.  It is Amirpour's first feature length film.  (Farsi is the official language of Iran, btw)

In an interview with Roger Corman  Amirpour said she was inspired by trying on a chador (a Persian open cloak that covers the hair and drapes down the length of the body) and wanting to be on skateboard:

[The chador] has this weight, and it moves a certain way, and I just felt like a stingray. And I wanted to be on a skateboard.  So, and then I thought, 'This is an Iranian vampire.'  Of course. And how has nobody thought of this? ...  I just thought, 'What a brilliant disguise.   It's the last person you'd expect...'

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was partially crowdfunded via a 2012 Indiegogo campaign, with an assist from a supportive tweet by Margaret Atwood, before getting other investors, including Elijah Wood (i.e Frodo from Lord of the Rings) who is credited as a producer.

(Note: I got some of these details from the IndieWire interview series "How they Funded It" but, to my immense irritation, the article doesn't actually say who from the production they were talking to.  It's not Amirpour, unless she speaks of herself in third person, but other than that I don't know who the Q&A subject was.  I wish I had a better citation.)

The film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, the largest independent film festival in the United States, and was up for Best of NEXT Audience Award.

I'm not going to be talking too much about the plot but in the broadest of strokes, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night follows a young man named Arash and the solitary vampire that wanders the fictional Bad City's streets at night.  After a chance meeting the isolated Arash and the lonely vampire, unnamed and credited only as "The Girl," develop an emotional bond.

The film stars Sheila Vand as the Girl and Arash Marandi as Arash.

Note: I'm not going to be particularly avoiding spoilers but I am going to be talking a bit about the ending, which while not containing a shocking twist or anything, is something that I'm glad I experienced without foreknowledge.  That brief discussion will be in it's own section and I'll give a warning before I get to it if you want to skip ahead there.

Filmmaking

The Aesthetic

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is shot entirely in black and white, with dramatic shadows, effective frames, and good blocking.  There's a lot of different kinds of shots without them feeling scattered or random.  The film is just really assured and everything feels very purposeful.  I would have never guessed this was Amirpour's first feature length work.

The film was very clearly planned with care.  Per Amirpour:

I'm pretty OCD about constructing the spaces, what the sets are gonna look like. I do many, many trips to locations, shoot camera tests in every location, every exterior, interior.  So I know what things are gonna look like. I do storyboards. I like to go in there with this, because you do have, once it's going, it's like this rocket ship that you just gotta keep up with.

The film has a great sense of scenic composition and detail. An instructive example is the scene where the Girl reveals her true nature to the audience, as broken down by Kane Geary O'Keeffe in his great video essay "The Fox and the Rabbit."

In this scene the Pimp, Saeed, has brought the Girl to his home after finding her wandering the streets at night.  As O'Keefe perceptively lays out:

We can pretty much draw a line across the screen, splitting the room into the prey zone and the predator zone. With Saeed, we see that he is imbued and surrounded by the image of the predator. This is his den.  His couches are surrounded by images of tigers and cheetahs. He's got a tiger on his back. He's even got a tiger tattoo on his abdomen.  Contrast this to the girl, and she's both physically and figuratively aligned with the image of prey. She's surrounded by the mounted heads of dead deer, and behind her, we find a tank of small, docile fish. From the get go, this scene uses imagery and space to establish a power dynamic, with Saeed as predator and the girl as prey.

... We watch as the girl slowly drifts into the zone of the predator.  While Saeed reads this as her moving into place for him to prey on her it is actually the girl who is moving into her natural position as predator in this situation. ...

Skip to the end of this scene, and what do we find? The girl moving freely within the zone of the predator, and Saeed's lifeless body lying just over the line into where he belongs.

That's just one of many examples of the movie's great visual storytelling.

The Design of the Vampire

I really like how the Girl looks and acts and, as Amirpour said, no one would expect that this slight, pretty young woman in a chador is an apex predator.  The Girl, consciously or not, weaponizes the expected submission of a demur young woman in a patriarchal world.  Amirpour, in the video Anatomy of a Scene by the New York Times, talks about how she and Sheila Vand

...looked at a lot of cobra videos and cat videos. And they imitate and mimic their prey and that was definitely something we absorbed into the physicality of this vampire.

O'Keefe picks up on this idea, too, noting how the Girl's clothing, with her black chador and black and white striped shirt evoke the hood and ventral (belly) scales of a cobra.

The Setting

Bad City is a dusty and rundown dead end town populated by shady people, limited prospects, and one lonely vampire.  It's also an oil town and the rigs on the outskirts are a constant presence.  The movie was filmed Taft, California.

Weirdly, it feels both like a real place but also kind of not, like it's perhaps a sort of purgatory filled with lost souls and it manages to be tactile and realistic but also kind of dreamlike as the geography is a little fuzzy and so much of the environmental imagery, like the dramatic shots of the oil rigs, feels representational.

Joshua Mobley, in his video essay A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night And The Melancholic Beauty Of Gothic Horror, says:

Films like Invisible Man and Frankenstein take place in an almost dreamlike neverland that doesn't exist and never did exist. Likewise, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, also takes place in a world that seems to exist more as a metaphor rather than an actual location we would recognize. Metaphors run deep in Gothic literature and cinema.

The not-quite-real fairy tale vibe is also reflected in the end credits which have most of the characters listed with an archetype title:, e.g. The Girl, Hossein 'The Junkie,' Saeed 'The Pimp,' Shaydah 'The Princess.'  Arash is the only speaking part to have just his name listed.

Soundtrack

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a quiet film but the music in it is awesome.  It's a mix of Iranian, American, and English indie music, with songs serving as a score and a lot of the songs with lyrics being diegetic.  (i.e music the characters are listening to).  It all feels very integrated into the drama and there's good reason for that.

In that interview with Corman, Amirpour said:

Lots of times, when I'm thinking of characters or scenes, music is one of the first things, and sometimes I design everything around [it]. I had all the music before when I was writing the script and it was, like, part of the architecture of everything.

The instrumental tracks, mostly by the Portland psychedelic rock band Federale, are a mix of rock, country, and Spaghetti Western, with enough hints of eastern sounding melodies that I was surprised to find out they were from the United States.  A lot of their stuff sounds intentionally cinematic.

The tracks with lyrics, both the English and Farsi ones, are really great and sit in my indie music sweet spot: authentic and interesting without being annoyingly quirky or inaccessible.   Amirpour clearly has good, but not snobbish, taste in music.

A few songs that really struck me:

• "Dancing Girls (Suite 304 Demo)" by Farah when we're first introduced to the Girl putting on her makeup and dancing alone in her apartment.  The song is a synth heavy electronic song in both Farsi and English with an almost hypnotic groove.

• "Bread Thief" by Bei Ru during the dreamy, erotic, and drug fueled dance party just before Arash meets the Girl.

• "Death" by the English band White Lies, which plays during Arash and the Girl's first bonding scene in her house.  It's got a great driving build up and the chorus has a sense of catharsis that is perfect for a scene where two characters are breaking into a new world together.

Two of those songs are explicitly diegetic and the song from the dance party might be as well.

There are also unsettling low ambient drones that crescendo in moments of tension, a choice that is both effective and not overused.

Acting

I think the acting in this is really strong, top to bottom.  Sheila Vand as the Girl conveys a lot with not all that much dialog and she manages to be by turns lonely, threatening, and vulnerable.  Arash Marandi as the protagonist Arash is an obvious standout as well.  Arash the character is juggling a lot of emotions and struggling to wrangle circumstances beyond his control and Marandi is absolutely convincing, again with not a huge amount of dialog.  (Though he says a lot more than the Girl.)  Marandi is absolutely fantastic at the end, capturing a lot of complicated and intense stuff without overplaying any of it.

The central pair also plays well off each other.  Arash's lost soul matches perfectly with the Girl's lost soul and they both really sell their mutual fascination and connection.

The minor characters are also portrayed well with Mozhan Navabi, Dominic Rains, Marshall Manesh, and Rome Shadanloo turning in good performances as The Prostitute, The Pimp, The Junkie, and The Princess, respectively.

Tension

The movie isn't all that scary but there are some extremely fraught moments.  The Girl's attack on Saeed is a slow build of tension culminating in an abrupt reversal of the power dynamic when she bites off the finger he's put in her mouth.  The image of her slowly removing the severed digit from her mouth as he screams in pain and terror is the most horrific moment in the film.

Other than that scene the movie tends more toward creepy than frightening though the Girl interrogating the young Street Urchin is very suspenseful.  Both the viewer and the Urchin aren't super sure what answer is going to get him eaten.  (She lets him off with a warning.)

Themes

Given the dreamlike setting and how little guidance the film gives as to what the viewer is supposed to take from it, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night contains a lot of things to ruminate on. I'm just going to touch on a few things that I thought about while watching and while thinking about it afterwards.

A Vampire in a Chador

This film had less explicit socio-political commentary than I was expecting, given the premise of a hijab wearing vampire in Iran.  The two women we see in public, the Girl and Atti the Prostitute do cover their hair (i.e. wear the hijab) but Shaydah the Princess doesn't, nor do the partygoers in the dance scene.

There's no prowling morality police.  There's no government presence, national or local, in the film at all.  In keeping with the Western theme, Bad City is more like a lawless frontier town.

The culture in Bad City is patriarchal, sure, but then again it is in most places.

Is Saeed the Pimp's assured confidence that he can control the women around him a commentary on Iranian society or is it because he's an asshole who intimidates everyone in town?  Could be either or both, depending on how you read it.

The hijab itself is such a loaded and often heated topic that the complicated and sometimes nuanced perspectives of the actual women involved get elided.  I heard it put this way once, and I'm paraphrasing, that the militant Islamists think they just need to mandate the hijab and women will immediately become good Muslim girls and on the other end Westerners think all they have to do is tear the veil off and women will immediately become good Western girls.

Amirpour herself talked about feeling "badass" when she put on the chador, but with the caveat that of course she was able to take it off whenever she wanted.  The three women in the film are all along the hijab spectrum, with the Girl wearing a chador in public, Atti wearing a headscarf over otherwise modern dress, and Shaydah not covering her head at all.  (Though we don't see Shaydah in a public space.)

The film itself, at least to me, didn't seem to put much weight on the hijab one way or the other, as either a signifier of oppression or of unexpected badassery.

For her part, Amirpour said in a Wired article:

If there's one political thing [in the film], it's not the chador, it's [the gender fluid background character] Rockabilly, because it's not okay to be gay in Iran.

In the Roger Corman interview, Amirpour described the film this way:

I think, for me, the film is very, very personal.  I think things that happen in the film happened inside me, and they happen in all the places in the world that I've been to, which is loneliness, being misunderstood, wanting to find a connection. Feeling isolated.  I feel like there's a heaviness in lots of societies and I don't really think it's a geographically specific thing.

It seems that the intent wasn't to purposefully make a film to comment specifically on Iranian society but to tell a universal story with the cultural elements coming in because of her own personal journey:

I'm made out of Iranian stuff.  And I was also born in Europe, and I was raised here [in the United States]. I lived in Miami, and then I had my puberty in Bakersfield, in the desert mall country, Mexican gangs, and malls. So, I'm a stew. I feel like that's one of the things about America, too, where you're such a stew. So I feel like the film, in many ways, is very accurate to my personal Iranianness, or whatever I am.

Isolation

A sense of loneliness and isolation pervades this film  To quote Amirpour again:

All the characters in the story, the way I see them are, are isolated and grappling with something that keeps them away from other people, and from themselves, and from knowing what they want, and figuring out how to get that.

In keeping with this, characters are often isolated in the frame, off center, and frequently in the middle distance.  There's a lot of negative space and they're often just far enough away from the camera that their faces are hard to see in detail, which has a distancing effect.

Even when two characters are in the same shot they are still visually separated, standing on different planes in space or different elevations in the frame because of the camera angle or the scene geography, or literally standing far apart from each other.

One of the big questions the film explores is whether people even can connect with each other or break out of their isolation.  The Girl articulates this in a conversation with Atti the Prostitute:

The Girl

You're sad. You don't remember what you want. You don't remember wanting. It passed long ago. And nothing ever changes.

Atti

Idiots and rich people are the only ones who think things can change.

The Girl is addressing Atti, here, but her words obviously also apply to her own feelings of despair and emptiness.

Bad City itself also feels empty, almost haunted.  Which, of course, it is, but not just by the supernatural. The very few people we see walking the streets are all adrift or trapped.

Arash and the Girl are two lost souls that encounter each other in the street by chance and in that first interaction, they have this telling exchange:

Arash

I'm lost.  Where are we?

The Girl

Bad City.

Arash

Bad City? I live in Bad City. This doesn't look like Bad City. Does it?  It's not familiar.

Neither of them know where they are or where to go next.

Both Arash and the Girl are so dislocated that even in their bonding scene after she takes him back to her place, they don't even have the words to express what they are feeling.  The shared experience of the music they are listening to draws them closer, the song giving voice to the ineffability of their emotions.

This is also the first scene where the cinematic barriers between two characters are pierced.  After the Girl puts on the record, there's a striking fairly close in shot of the Girl alone on the right side and facing out of the frame.  When, as the music crescendos, Arash slowly enters the frame from the left, we finally see two people on the same plane, on equal footing, finally in the same space.  When she turns to face him, they are only a few inches from each other and the way she lays her head on his chest is the most genuinely intimate thing we've seen so far.

It may be a small breakthrough but it is a breakthrough.

Vampirism

I like how the film uses the imagery of vampirism throughout.  The Girl is not the only vampire in Bad City, though she's the only literal one.

As Joshua Mobley says:

Bad City itself is a vampire of sorts, draining the earth of oil and slowly killing it. ... Saeed is a vampire of sorts to his community, selling drugs that ruin people's lives, stealing valuables, and exploiting others. Saeed also sells Arash's father the heroine he's hopelessly addicted to. The heroin is his own vampire, penetrating his skin and draining him of money, sanity, and life.

Bad City is full of predators and their prey and from one perspective the Girl can be seen as a corrective to the established order as there's an element of vigilantism to her predator drive.   She kills Saeed the Pimp and threatens the Street Urchin with this warning to stay on the straight and narrow:

I'll ask you one more time. Tell the truth. Are you a good boy? I can take your eyes out of your skull and give them to dogs to eat. Till the end of your life, I'll be watching you. ... Be a good boy.

There's maybe some subtextual stuff about challenging patriarchal power dynamics in that we do not see her attack any women.  She does not encounter Shaydah the Princess at all and does not overtly threaten Atti the Prostitute despite having an opportunity to when she goes to Atti's apartment.  I say "overtly" because she does almost appear to be stalking Atti on the street before they talk to each other the first time.

I don't think we quite get enough to definitively say the Girl is only a danger to the bad men of Bad City, but I think a persuasive argument could be made.

In any case, Bad City's default interpersonal interaction is predation, which means that Arash's unwitting disruption of the Girl's attack pattern with a combination of gentleness, compassion, and vulnerability is a disruption of the predator / prey cycle itself.  This clearly catches the Girl off guard and is what opens the door to her connecting with him.

A Brief Discussion of the Ending

Spoilers incoming, so jump ahead to the Gallimaufry if you want to avoid them.

The last 15 minutes of this film are really interesting for what they don't reveal.

After Arash kicks his father out of the house and Hossein brings his money, drugs, and cat to Atti's where he forces her to take heroin with him, the Girl intervenes and kills him.  She and Atti dump the body in the street and when Arash finds it the next morning, he decides it's time to leave Bad City for good.

Arash goes to the Girl's house and asks her to come with him and she wordlessly starts packing.  That's when Arash sees his father's cat, which the Girl took with her from Atti's.  He also sees the jewelry the Girl took from Saeed's dead body.  A lot goes across his face but he doesn't say anything.

They get in his car and start driving but he stops on the road and gets out.  After a long silence, he wordlessly gets back in the car, puts a cassette into the stereo and starts driving again as the credits roll.  Neither Arash nor the Girl have any lines once she starts packing.

There is a lot of good ambiguity here.  You can see Arash's wheels turning and the complex stew of conflict and confusion he's sitting with.  As I said earlier Marandi is really good here, but I like that he has no lines to concretely articulate where he's at.   

He doesn't know the Girl a vampire but is she a killer?  Does he think she killed Hossein or did he rationalize the cat and the jewelry away? Does it matter?  Does he get back in the car because of love or because he already made peace with sending his father to die on the streets when he kicked him out?  Is this price of freedom worth it?  Is he feeling guilty?

I also like how the moment he gets out of the car is shown from the Girl's perspective, not his, and Vand and the film felt like they were holding their breath.  Does she thinks he knows she killed his father or is she just scared he's going to reject her?  What would her response be? Sadness?  Violence?  She's balanced on a knife's edge and, like the audience, very unsure what he's going to say or do when he gets back in the car.

But he just puts on some music and they drive off.  What happens when they get to wherever they are headed together?  When will he find out her true nature?  Will he care?

I have no idea.

I really, really like this ending and I thought about it a lot afterwards.

Gallimaufry

• Listen to the song "Black Sunday" by Federale to get a sense of what some of the score tracks sound like.  Federale's website talks about how they are inspired by Italian films and there's a 1960 gothic horror film from Italy called "Black Sunday."  I doubt that's a coincidence.

• The Girl looks through Saeed's music collection after she kills him, which is a nice touch I didn't pick up on during my first viewing.

• I like this quote from Amirpour: "I think a film is, like, a ticket to adventure to a certain thing that you're fascinated by."

• It's cute that Arash, a little wobbly from the drugs at the costume party, is dressed as Dracula when meets the Girl for the first time.  I think the fact that, after trying to be charming or mysterious (or both) and introducing himself with "I'm Dracula,"  he then turned to walk away was a important moment for the Girl.  He meant it earlier when he said "I won't hurt you."   He wasn't going to push a boundary with a girl on the street alone at night.

• The oil rigs just outside of town are always kind of looming and I really like the moody and ominous shots of them.  Amirpour said this about them with regards to vampirism:

Well, to a certain extent, the oil pump could be vampires sucking the blood in the earth.

O'Keefe in The Fox and the Rabbit mentions how they "resemble a fang biting down into its prey."

• I like that, on their "date" at the power plant, Arash asks the Girl "What was the last song you listened to?"

• Arash's cat gets a credit in the end titles as...The Cat.  It's real name was Masuka and this is its only role listed on imdb.  (It was 12 years ago, I suspect Masuka is no longer with us.)

• Amirpour originally made A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as a short film in 2012 which won Best Short Film at the Noor Iranian Films awards.

• I like the moment when the Girl tilts Arash's head back and there's a brief pause when she's looking at his neck before she just lays her head on his chest.  In retrospect it's obvious she wasn't going to bite him, but for a brief moment I wasn't sure.  And it's a nice visualization of her resisting her normal detachment and wanting a different kind of intimacy.

• I really have no recollection where I heard about this film.  Like absolutely no recollection.  But thank you to whatever writer on whatever website it was.

• I like that the soundtrack is a mix of Iranian, American, and English music, the stew that Amirpour described herself as.

• I like that there is no reveal of the the Girl's history.  How long has she been stalking Bad City?  Where did she come from?  How long has she been around?   ... Shrug.

• The scene where Arash's father Hossein, either in heroin withdrawal or strung out, thinks their cat is his dead wife reincarnated was sad, touching, and disturbing all at the same time.  Marshall Manesh played it really well, as did Marandi.

• The scene where the Girl mimics Arash's dad reminds me of the scene in Interview with the Vampire (1994) where Santiago does the same with Louis.  In her interview with Corman Amirpour said Anne Rice got her into vampires.  I don't know if this mimicry was intentional homage or subconscious reference or neither.

Conclusion

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a fantastic addition to the vampire corpus.  So if you like atmospheric, understated, and well-crafted films, or just want to support an indie creator, please check it out.

-m