Classic Horror and Modern Femme Fatale in “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night”
Director Ana Lily Amirpour meshes the western genre with film noir in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. She creates an Iranian-based feminist masterpiece that tackles the grit of Iranian “Bad City”.
With a title like A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, particularly one that teeters on the slopes of both the film-noir classics and modern horror, it’s understandable to predict the gruesome outcome of a teenage girl who walks the streets alone. Perhaps this was the intention of director Ana Lily Amirpour upon making a film that already bursts through the conventions of so many other genre (and gender) stereotypes.
What makes A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night so internationally alluring, beyond the bold choice to keep the script spoken entirely in Farsi or the decision to set Iranian “Bad City” in the Californian desert, is the timeless ways Amirpour nods to other genres. Her masterpiece is grounding in so many ways: with classic cars, greaser-esque Iranian boys, and a modern soundtrack, while entirely uprooting in others. It is the first film featuring a vigilante vampire skateboarding in a hijab that I’ve ever seen.
Amirpour challenges the roles of women in the Western, Horror, and Romance genres in the ways the camera and the script give over complete narrative control to The Girl’s (Sheila Vand) reality.
The Girl haunts every scene, lurking in a cape-like chador in the backstreets of her city (an imagined Iranian city) — a vigilante-of-sorts against men that threaten the neighborhood women.
Hers is a story that reclaims the feminine experience of walking home alone at night. The men of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night are the only ones who should be afraid to keep their backs turned on the cobblestone streets. The Girl dominates the screen even in vacant, street-lamp-lit shots where she is but a small streak of black cloak in the corner of the screen gliding behind a victim.
Much of the setting gives us nothing but empty streets and chain-link fences. It is an isolating feeling to know that there is nothing to distract us from the fate of The Girl’s next victim if you are watching this film from a male perspective. As a woman, though, it may be strangely liberating. Every long shot that tracks her movements insinuates the monster lurking in the shadows, unbeknownst to the characters.
Another common technique of the classic vampire horror genre (even as old as F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu) is the use of shadows to create the tension and the mood of the film. The shadows that encompass The Girl help her blend in with the night. However, no traditional costume design that utilizes pale skin, long, crooked, fingers, or a widow’s peak are really necessary here. Instead, her black eyeshadow and gleaming teeth give us that same traditional vampire presence we are used to.
A modern touch that is worth noting is the black and white striped shirt that Vand’s character is seen sporting throughout Amirpour’s work. The black eye shadow and the cropped bob were probably enough to gauge the time period of this film, so why the shirt? Is it used to distinguish her from the shadows? Probably not. It appears to represent the equilibrium that The Girl presents to Bad City through her killings. She is equal parts good and bad, black and white, killing off the disease of the town while also being a disease of sorts herself. She is “bad” as she admits halfway through the film. She is Bad City.
The Girl floats across the scene, cloaked in her chador and paces through the empty night air in a way that so elegantly sets the pace for the rest of the film. She is rarely in the center of the scene. The Girl usually appears in the corner of a long shot, or off to the side for an over-the-shoulder shot. This way, she is a predator stalking her prey, always in the shadows, and bat-like.
It makes every scene digestible — her surroundings are always visible, and furthermore they are shot from her perspective or an adjacent perspective giving the full experience of Bad City. When I think of traditional vampire movies, I think of vampires on stoops or creeping up the steps as F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu did so infamously with the shadows doing most of the work. I would argue here that just as importantly as the shadows are in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night are the camera angles. The Girl’s path only ever takes up about an eighth of the frame unless she is in a Western-style standoff with another character.
When she swoops in to kill, the camera gives her complete agency of her scenario. Calm and calculated, she is almost always looking down on her prey while the men are either full of rage or pining for her attention.
Romance plays a big part in this film, presenting a jarring turn in the fate of The Girl. She is not desperate for the attention of a boy, but rather, she gradually offers up her time and attention to him, mostly out of curiosity .
Arash, with his greaser style, vintage car, and Dracula costume, meets The Girl, high on ecstasy, in the middle of the street at night. He’s as much of a nod to 1950s America as he is to modern American teenage boyhood.
This film is just as much about setting the mood between the two young lovers as it is about The Girl learning her place in her city, and accepting her role as a vigilante, even if in some ways that makes her “bad”. The soundtrack of their romance is modern and multicultural, with Iranian and American songs interspersed throughout.
The Girl must learn to trust Arash and let her guard down. Yet even then, her role in each scene demands control of the situation. Arash approaches her, she turns to him to bite his neck in a way that is so romantically tethered to traditional vampire horror, it is almost cheesy. In the end of the film, she becomes Arash’s savior and his vigilante, killing off the disease in his life as she often does for the women of her city. It is not men she hates — it is injustice against women. Would she have been the end to all of the misfortune in Arash’s life had his father not been a contributor to the misogyny and predatory behavior of the male gaze in Bad City? Perhaps not.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night raises questions of justice and morality that it never intends to answer. Leaving a comfortable amount of un-answerables hanging in the air in its final scene provides space for the audience to make its own conclusions about its intentions. The agency that The Girl claims of the frame is furthered by this film’s cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scene.
The message demands attention and commands every scene. It is not a forgettable film, and the clever uses of setting, character placement in the shot, extensive long shots, and long takes deliver Amirpour’s message that The Girl is not someone to be messed with.
