Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, the 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night first premiered at Sundance and was marketed as the “first Iranian vampire Western.”
This, of course, is the absolute perfect description for a film.
In this narrative, we witness two distinct threads stitching their way through the fabric of a perverse fairy tale: a young woman’s undeath and a young man’s deathly life.
Struggling to make ends meets in an Iranian town called “Bad City,” Arash (Arash Marandi) works to supports himself and his father, Hossein (Marshall Manesh), who suffers from drug addiction. He tries to act confident, but the façade breaks apart every time he looks at his father, huddled on the floor, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Arash wants more, but he does not know whether his life will allow him to have more.
An unnamed woman (Sheila Vand) wearing red lipstick and a chador skateboards down the empty streets of the gloomy city. In a reversal of the horror film trope, it is not the girl who needs to be afraid of the night. Instead, the night fears her. Her chador flows behind her back, a long, black shadow, and her face remains unrippled, still.
At night, she follows Hossein, close, her figure a perverse mirror image of his hunched form. When he stands straight, facing her, he raises up a hesitant hand. She sticks her own hand up. When he pushes his arm out, she unfurls her arm. Unsettled, Hossein begins walking faster. She keeps following. As she shadows him, she seems to issue a warning—stay on the right track. But he’s too scared, too confused, to notice and he runs away. When he fails to heed her, he pays the violent price.
Later, the young vampire confronts a child who lives nearby. He stares up at her, terrified, as she grabs his collar. It is only in this scene that her voice deepens and warps. It becomes something monstrous. Here, she demands that he behave, telling him that she will always be in his life, watching. His eyes grow round, glassy, and he breathes heavily. With the abusers she kills, the young woman never appears uneasy or troubled. Instead, she watches them, her unerring calmness beginning to feel like hidden amusement, like she knows they will soon tremble at her feet, horrified, and the reality of the situation quietly fascinates her.
Here, with the boy, she looks resentful. She looks like she wants to tear him to pieces. And it is because she knows what the young boy can become, so quickly, so easily, if no one steps in. She knows how cultural misogyny wraps its fingers around the throats of its occupants, molded by false truths regarding control and violence. When she yanks the boy toward her, she does not see a child. She sees someone who will grow into an unearned power that will allow him to wreak havoc on those he considers disposable. So she gets angry. And she demands that he change, or she will do the changing, later, when he least expects it.
In “Notes for a Magazine,” Elana Dykewomon writes, “[A]lmost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’—of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.”
In this film, the woman of the story does not have to be on guard. To be a vampire is to indulge, fully, in the flux of her emotion. She does not have to worry that a situation or moment will suddenly engulf her. She is the thing that other people fear.
But the film is not just a horror movie. It is also a love story.
While watching the movie, I was surprised to realize that the true protagonist is not the young woman, but Arash. He opens the story with a cat in his arms, hair messily coifed, sunglasses shading his eyes. As he steps into a gleaming car, he informs the young boy following him that he is far from rich. He carefully saved for years to purchase his new prized possession. It is this very car that leads him to meet the vampire for the first time. After his father’s drug dealer steals the vehicle, Arash searches for his apartment in an effort to take it back. While pacing outside the gates of his home, a young woman brushes past him, her mouth red with blood. They watch each other.
After taking ecstasy at a club on Halloween, Arash wanders the streets, dazed. She finds him staring up at a lamp post, shrouded in a black cloak. He turns to her. “I’m Dracula,” he intones dramatically. She doesn’t respond. But her eyes watch, intrigued. Eventually, he sits on the sidewalk, nauseated, and declares that he will stay there forever. When she tells him he can stay with her, he insists that he needs to sit. In the next scene, she wheels him forward on her skateboard, his legs tucked in, and it is the young woman who saves the man from the uncertainty of the night.
This narrative is not interested in exposition. Instead, it is a love story that loves the art of silence. Rather than make the characters verbalize their evolving emotions, their anguish, the contradictory thoughts that pulse through their brains like neon lights, the film instead embraces the hush of discovery. This storytelling decision invokes a sense of profundity because we, the viewers, are able to shade in the unspoken beats of each turn with our own evaluations.
The film trusts its audience.
It invites us into every breath, every moment, with a steady hand, allowing us to color in the greys of the story. And this, in turn, intensifies the relationship between Arash and the quiet vampire. Rather than try to voice the complicated minutiae of their feelings, they instead look at each other, trying to read the unspoken intensity of the air. They know that words can fail people. They can sound silly, contrived, simple. They can fail to accurately encapsulate the gravity of their thoughts. So they look at each other. And in the silence, they know each other.
In her basement apartment, the vampire plays records of her favorite music. Arash jostles the small disco ball hanging from her ceiling and the silver pixels of light dance on the walls. As the young woman stands by her record player, the camera pulls back, offering up a static shot that positions the vampire near the right side of the frame. Empty space fills out the rest of the shot, creating a visual composition that leans into the asymmetry of the moment.
For an extended beat, she stays there, waiting, uncertain, her only anchor the music that she can touch with her hands. The film is not afraid of silence or nothingness. It is not afraid of making viewers wait. Eventually, breaths held, Arash enters from the left side of the frame. He walks slowly toward her. When she turns to look at him, there is a battle in her eyes, a flicker of ambiguity, indecision, that unmoors her. She tips his head back. And then she leans her face against his chest, choosing to listen to his heart, rather than any words that might come from his throat.
By the end of the film, Arash chooses to leave Bad City after discovering that his father has died. When he asks the vampire to leave with him, he slowly realizes that she had something to do with Hossein’s death. In the car, he drives with a frozen expression on his face, his eyes glancing back at the girl sitting beside him. Eventually, he parks on the side of the road and lurches out the door. He walks back and forth in front of the bright headlights. She watches, silent, from the passenger seat. She knows that he has to make a decision. Again and again, Arash marches in the blackness.
Then, he gets back into the car and turns on the ignition.
As he leans forward and turns on the music, the lyrics unstitch, his flat expression unstitches, her blank mouth unstitches into a quiet smile. Like her, we know that he has witnessed her darkness and, still, he chooses her.
As they drive away, I can’t help but think about a poem by Hala Alyan called “Object Permanence.” It murmurs in my head, a new music to this film:
Sometimes I feel washed up as paper. You’re
three years away. But then I dance down Graham
and
the trees are the color of champagne and I
remember—
There are things I like about heartbreak, too,
how it needs
a good soundtrack. The way I catch a man’s gaze
on the L
and don’t look away first. Losing something is
just revising it.
After this love there will be more love.
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