A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, film review: Slick Iranian vampire movie is exquisitely shot

(15) Ana Lily Amirpour, 99 mins. Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh

'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night', starring Sheila Vand

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a very slick and surprising vampire movie. It has Iranian characters but the look and feel of an early Jim Jarmusch movie, or of Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish.

It is exquisitely shot in black-and-white. The setting is a noir-ish place called Bad City, full of pimps, prostitutes and drug addicts. The vampire "girl" (Sheila Vand) looks more like a rebellious art-school student than like Ingrid Pitt in a Hammer movie. She has an ethereal beauty, strange musical tastes (Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson seem to be favourites) and very bloody and violent appetites.

In its lesser moments, the film, backed by Vice Films, risks being undermined by its own narcissistic preoccupation with form over narrative. Its story doesn't make all that much sense at all. However, its English-born director, Ana Lily Amirpour, in her feature debut, has the formal ability to get away with her self-indulgence. The film is so stylishly shot, and performed with such swagger, that it transcends its own pretentiousness.