Movie Review: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
I don’t care what you need to do to go see this movie but you should go see Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. Peter Jackson and every other bang wow maximalist should be forced to watch this movie until they learn that great style can come from minimal budgets and real world locations that don’t require any CGI.
A Girl Walks Home at Night brings up images of Film Noir, Jim Jarmusch, The Last Picutre Show, Ingmar Bergman, German Expressionism, and Italian Neo-Realism all rolled into one deadpan suspense masterpiece.
The movie takes place in a middle of nowhere Iranian oiltown with the evocative name of Bad City. The actual filming was done in Bakersfield and Ana Amirpour films this very real city with much more style and emotion than Frank Miller could give to his precious Sin City if he had all the money and technology in the world.
We mainly hang-out among the have-nots of Bad City especially an uncommonly good-looking (even by movie standards), hardworking but hardscrabble gardener named Arash. Arash lives with his junkie dad in a small flat near the tracks and loses his beloved Ford Thunderbird to a bullying and flashy drug dealer at the start of the film because his widowed dad can’t pay for his heroin. The other people we meet are a spoiled young woman whose day seems to revolve talking about getting wasted and getting wasted, a sex worker who has been walking the streets for longer than she would like to remember, a young boy, and a mysterious character only called The Girl.
The Girl listens to American music on vinyl and can easily be seen as a hipster with her Breton shirt, skinny jeans, lipstick, and Chucks. The only thing that sets her apart is the Chador that the Girl is required to wear because of the strict rules of the Islamic Iran.
The Girl has a secret though and this secret makes her far more deadly than meets the eye and makes her Chardor more threatening and deadly than it is modest. She begins to use it like Death from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and the characters may try to run from her unnerving appearance but they cannot hide for long. Arash is seemingly the only character who is not unnerved or frightened by The Girl and begins to develop of a bit of a crush on her.
The movie is not perfect. It drags at times and probably could have stood to be twenty or thirty minutes shorter. But it was still one of the most original movies I have seen in a while and like The One I Love, I am glad that people are still trying to be daring with plot, story, and conceit and be proud to fail a bit for the sake of being original.
The Performances are all stellar and the best part of the movie should be the lesson that great style does not need a large budget. I’ve written many times about my general growing contempt for the CGI-filled mega blockbusters and comic book franchises that I call bang wow movies. They are not all bad. Most of them are competently made and enjoyable to watch at the time but they don’t stick with me and I don’t really want to talk about them after the fact. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is a movie that I want to talk about and it does show that you can do great style on very little movie. The cinematography was crisp and contributed to a constant sense of dread and suspense through out the film. This is a town where even the rich and privileged lead repetitive and boring lives because there is not much to do except go to all-night house parties and do drugs. Oil Rigs show how boring the town is and how everyone is seemingly just wasting life and act as symbols of grave diggers.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is probably only playing on a select amount of screens and I am not sure it is available on streaming services yet but if you get an opportunity to see this movie, go see it.
Agree that this is really one worth seeking out, but my enthusiasm for it is somewhat tempered by the much better and somewhat similar indie The Babadook, which I think is the best film of 2014 (at least, of those I’ve seen).Report
Yay a comment!
I haven’t seen The Badadook but it also got good reviews. Why did you find it much better?Report
I like to believe that when a post doesn’t get a lot of comments, it means that it was of such a crystalline purity and perfection that nobody could add anything. I’m sticking with that!
I did have a comment on this post, although it might not add much. Someone mentioned art films on here recently and this:
I am glad that people are still trying to be daring with plot, story, and conceit and be proud to fail a bit for the sake of being original.
seems like a pretty good definition of an art film.Report
Of course the other answer could be that very few of us has seen the movie 🙂Report
If you want comments, next time you need to pick an art film that the North Koreans threatened to blow up.Report
Kim Jong-un Walks Home at Night?Report
@rufus-f @mike-schilling
Kim Jong-un Dances in the DarkReport
Speaking of art films, did anyone else see Under the Skin? I just did, still chewing on it. A Girl Walks Home Alone seems like it might have certain similarities (Jarmusch made one not too long ago that might also).
Since this isn’t MD, in your opinion is there intended political significance to the fact that The Girl has American affectations, and that an industry which sucks fluid to sustain life figures so prominently in the film? I don’t need spoilers, but from your review that sort of stands out.
The Babadook is def. on my to-see list.
But I may have to finally watch Her first, keep my ScarJo scifi roll going.Report
I’ve been meaning to see Under the Skin, although the Kubrick comparisons were putting me off. That’s quite a lot to live up to. Nevertheless, Rex Reed panned the film, which means it’s probably pretty good.Report
@glyph
I think the film is supposed to be more of a commentary on how women are seen and treated in Iranian society and it is not really about the American film industry.
I don’t know much in detail but the little I know is that in Iran there is a lot of surface level appearance to keep up with rules set by the Islamic regime but it is very secular underneath and women frequently wear Western clothing under their Chadors (often with Western levels of skimpiness). There are also lots of house parties which are indistinguishable from how young Americans would party especially the middle and upper-classes. Iran was a pretty secular (though tyrannical in different ways) under the Shah.Report
@saul-degraw
The Babadook is astonishingly accomplished, so much so that it is hard to believe it is director Jennifer Kent’s first feature. There’s not a shot wasted or an image that doesn’t resonate and the sound design is effectively creepy and clever. It’s not so much that Kent seems to have thought of everything (though it does seem that she has) as it is that she seems to have such complete mastery of her material that she is able to bend and twist and direct us viewers exactly as she wishes without leaving us feeling manipulated. The story is so gripping and terrifying that I’m not sure I’d necessarily recommend it to all parents — it cuts considerably closer to the bone than most of the psychologically damaged child/parent relationship explorations and examinations of motherhood it comments on, from The Exorcist to Ringu / The Ring, Rosemary’s Baby to The Shining. Essie Davis as the mother turns in a performance worthy of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion and the kid is scary good. It is just a perfectly realized movie that doesn’t stint on ambition or creativity to get to its perfection.
I should say it’s not really fair to criticize A Girl Walks Home… because I liked The Babadook better. It’s just that it is rare enough for two assured, visually stylized first features with horror-movie appeal directed by women to be released in the same year, let alone within a month or so of each other, that it is too easy to fall into the trap of “compare/contrast.” I liked The Babadook better than any 2014 film I’ve seen.Report
@glyph — Yes to Under the Skin, another of the year’s best, I thought. I read (and loved) the book over a decade ago couldn’t imagine how anyone could make it into a movie, so this struck me as a particular achievement.Report
@rufus-f – did you ever see this glorious thrashing of Rex Reed?:
http://www.avclub.com/article/rex-reed-reviews-movie-he-only-watched-for-20-minu-99973Report
That seems like an odd and unnecessary dig at a director who is quite talented in finding beauty in real-world locations. It’s not as though every one of his movies has been set in Middle Earth.Report
Has anyone here watched Bad Taste? It looks like he shot that for $5,000 in his backyard and did all the effects by hand.Report