Glasgow Film Festival 2015: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Junkies, dealers, swindlers, pimps and chancers, all shimmering in the dark night. As Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez did with their decidedly masculine Sin City, so writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour has captured Los Angeles on gorgeous black-and-white video to create the fictional Persian town of Bad City, for what she describes as “the first Iranian vampire western.” And as a gunslinger would rain justice down in those Wild West narratives we’ve seen countless times before, so the moral arbiter here is the female bloodsucker.
As disparate as its influences are the emotions Amirpour’s languid, moody, topsy-turvy piece inspire: it’s righteous, shocking, terrifying, iconic, funny, twistedly romantic and refreshingly unpredictable. The film also contains the year's most erotically charged scene, which is all the more astonishing for being chaste: all it contains are two lonely young people listening to a record and longing to touch. [Ian Mantgani]