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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a beautiful nightmare dipped in a silvery varnish. The narrative thrust of the film doesn’t matter, what matters is the evocative mood and daring visual sense of prior and encroaching gloom and doom. It seems only natural that a vampire would thrive among these streets, but it’s a bit of a shock that she looks like Jean Seberg in Breathless and dances around in her room to 80s pop (check the Madonna and Michael Jackson posters in her room).
Not only is this a vampire film, and something of a dystopian science-fiction mood piece, but clearly indebted to westerns, mainly the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. Sheila Vand, the girl of the title, stands and swaggers around like she’s the Man with No Name. I guess she would be the Vampire with No Name here, but she radiates a sense of cloistered danger that seeps out whenever her sense of moral indignation goes off. Otherwise, she’s positively girlish, in an abstracted way, in how she spends much of her time in her apartment listening to pop music and applying makeup. Vand’s vampire feeds as much off of the blood of drug dealers as she does on ephemera of pop culture.
Then there’s Arash Marandi’s handsome dreamer, so corruptible and dressed like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind, depending on how you look at it. Marandi frequently becomes something of a damsel-in-distress, and Vand the avenging vigilante swooping in to rescue him and fall into a muted form of attraction and sexual desire. With his kissable lips and soulful eyes, Arash Marandi is an obvious pinup object for any girl, or gay boy, to swoon over and want to protect.
It’s consistently fun to witness how the film flips the genders around even if it lapses into full-scale blunt force trauma. No one could ever accuse A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night of being subtle about its politics and machinations, but it does so with a full-bodied commitment that is admirable. Even its strange diversions, glimpses of neighborhood denizens doing mundane actions that have nothing to do with the main thrust of the story, are performed with a theatrical commitment that would make even the most diehard of Broadway babies blush and comment that they maybe should tone it down.
