Get Your Reps In: “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” Is Much More Than a Vampire Movie

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Languorous sensuality has run through the veins of vampire movies since 1931 when Bela Lugosi fixed his gaze on Tod Browning’s camera lens and held it…and held it…and held it. Eighty years later, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), feasted on that suggestive passion in a way not seen since The Hunger (1983), with which it shares a similar music-video vernacular.

A Girl unfolds on the nocturnal streets of an Iranian town, full of ‘50s Americana flourishes, filmed in black-and-white, and scored by Ennio Morricone homages. With her flowing black burka acting as a striking variation on the vampire’s cape, a nameless shadow (Sheila Vand) stalks the night, sometimes terrifying the townspeople, sometimes daring the oppressively masculine climate to victimize her.

When she encounters Arash (Arash Marandi)—an upstanding, James Dean-fashioned young man dealing with his father’s heroin addiction—her calculus changes. Their encounters have all the “but I don’t want to kill you, human” sexual repression that defined Edward and Bella’s relationship, but executed with patient, wordless fluidity by Amirpour.

One near-bite back at the vampire’s apartment suggests slow motion so convincingly that you wonder how Vand and Marandi are controlling their bodies so carefully. And hoo-whee...what if they let go? 5th Avenue, Oct. 27-29.

ALSO PLAYING:

Academy: Beetlejuice (1988), Oct. 27-Nov. 2. The Boogeyman (1980), Oct. 27-Nov. 2. Cinema 21: Raging Bull (1980), Oct. 28. Freaks (1932) and Safe in Hell (1931), Oct. 29 and 30. Clinton: Ringu (1998), Oct. 28. Dr. Caligari (1989), Oct. 30. Hollywood: The Haunting (1963), Oct. 26. The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Oct. 28. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988), Oct. 28. Spanish Dracula (1931), Oct. 29. The Haunting of Julia (1977), Oct. 29.