Films at HEART FilmFeast: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Tom Grieve, Contributing WriterBook now
Films at HEART FilmFeast: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Spend Halloween in Bad City, Iran, with Headingley Enterprise and Arts Centre’s spooky season, film and food screening of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Cast in moody black and white, with a too-cool-for-school soundtrack that ranges from Farsi synth-pop to Morricone-esque guitars, Amirpour’s stylish art-house blood-sucker stands out in a crowded field of stylish art-house blood-suckers.
Like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark before it, the film cannily combines vampire and Western iconography, punctuating the knife-edge tension of deserted streets with moments of animal ferocity and eerie intimacy as a lonesome, chador-clad teenage vampire (Sheila Vand) stalks — and sometimes skates — the streets of the fictional Iranian ghost town.
Weaving through the sex workers, sleazy pimps and desperate drug addicts who populate the urban landscape, in search of her prey, the titular girl befriends a young man struggling to take care of his heroin-addicted father. Amirpour trades in timeless, universal themes of loneliness, desire and insatiable compulsion that have driven vampire movies for a century, but renewed, refreshed and relocated, with a pointed feminist point of view, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has become an essential entry in the canon.
