Review of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

I have a confession to make: this isn’t the first time I’ve come to revisit this movie. As someone obsessed with Iranian feminism and what it means to self-express in a society that really doesn’t want you doing that, I watched this movie for the first time a hot minute ago, and throughout the years it keeps coming up again.

There are some movies I end up watching multiple times because of how it comes back into my life through weird intervals, and this time I had to watch it because of class.

I was taking a graduate level seminar on The Human and performance theory, and we had to watch this movie on the weeks we were talking about abject.

Then, this time, I had to rewatch it because I was writing about the movie for my writing work at MovieWeb.

We ran a series called 31 Days of Horror for October 2023, and I chose to write about this movie because it felt fitting to write about Iranian women and the monsters we make up in our mind.

That means I’ve seen this film about five times now, and I feel pretty comfortable talking about it whenever it inevitably comes up in a conversation.

Here’s my review.

Bad City is haunted by sin, what was left behind, and a lone chador-wearing vampire.

Technically, the main character in this movie is Arash, who lives with his father Hossein. Hossein is straight up addicted to heroin, which puts them in some difficult situations.

The most immediate one is the fact a drug dealer slash pimp named Saeed comes to the family and takes Arash’s car because of the debt his father owe Saeed. Saeed is where he gets the drugs from, and so he becomes an antagonist of sorts in the beginning section of the movie.

But when Saeed is wandering the streets one night, he meets a young woman wearing a chador. She’s kind of strange to begin with, but when she invites him back to her apartment, he agrees to follow her home.

When they enter the threshold, she reveals herself to be a vampire, bites off his finger, and then kills him by biting Saeed straight on the neck. Arash goes out looking Saeed in that moment, and when she’s leaving, she comes across Arash but leaves him alone.

Arash discovers Saeed dead, so he steals back his car keys along with a suitcase of drugs and cash. He sells the drugs, which gives him the chance to quit his job and live life a bit more freely.

The next major event in his life is that he goes to a costume party as Dracula, takes an ecstasy pill, and then ends up on the streets high as a kite. Leading up to the next major scene, we learn more about the mysterious vampire girl.

Although she wears a chador out on the streets, she spends a good chunk of her time alone in the apartment just listening to music like an average teenage girl.

She also wanders the streets skateboarding, which one wouldn’t expect with someone of her appearance, and that’s what she is doing when she comes across the stoned Arash on the streets.

He impresses her, and she invites him back to her apartment to listen to music. She doesn’t kill him, and the next evening they meet again.

She admits to him that she’s done some terrible things, which he shakes off and offers her earrings instead. He then pierces her ears for her so she can use his gift.

One of Saeed’s prostitutes has a B plot where they’re paid what Saeed owed them, and the woman, who is following them, tells the prostitute she has no idea what it means to be truly desire anymore.

At the same time, Hossein, going through major withdrawal, gets kicked out by Arash, and the woman ends up killing him.

Arash finds his body the next morning and tells the woman to run away from this place with him, but when the cat, who had been with Hossein, enters, he realizes she helped kill his father. Although he is uncertain about it, he enters and exits the car before getting back in and continuing the journey with him.

Overall Thoughts

There is so much to unpack when it comes to this movie that I would need an entire blog post dedicated to analysis.

If you want to read more on my work about how this is about constructed monsters, I suggest clicking in the writing tab at the top and finding the piece I wrote on MovieWeb about this.

I think this is such a good movie though, and it’s an early example of what female Iranian American filmmakers can do (as I’m writing this I’m fresh off of seeing The Persian Version, which is also unconventional in its approach). Support more SWANA writers and filmmakers!

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