A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

For coffee-shop intellectuals whose vampire-themed experience begins with Murnau and ends with Jarmusch, this will be a relaxing and refreshing look at Iranian cinema. Everyone else will tear their hair out from boredom. The film is about as vibrant and generally beneficial as a hypothetical version of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry made by Robert Rodriguez. (01/08/2015)

The first half: a confused search of sense and order, with a well made atmospheric scene here and there. The second half: no sense and order found, utter disinterest. (03/26/2015)

Pulling out Jarmusch is a rather sad example of lack of judgment in this random and incredibly superficial and intuitively random mixture of traditions / genres / assumed poses. While Jarmusch has created an electrifying, tight, and mythologically rich universe, Amirpour only mechanically shows off potentially interesting motifs that can be enjoyed, but nothing more. Her world is a corpse thesis, a cinéma du look without magnetism and discovery (even the transitions between genres are more convulsive than elegant). In some respects, it is basically ideologically close to Xavier Dolan's early films, but they had (annoyingly for many people) a dandy swing and narcissistic passions. Slowness can be magical, enchanting and engaging. Or just diligently depressing. This is, in my view, is the case of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. (01/08/2015)

Sometimes Ana Lily Amirpour is dazzled by the fact that she's filming something at all, and sometimes she falls into the delusion that she's making great art. But overall, this visit to nocturnal Tehran with a vampire in the background is a pleasant variation on European vampire stories inspired by Gothic novels and influenced by modern romanticism. In Europe, we associate the fight against vampires with Christian crosses and holy water, but it's evident that they are quite successful even in an Islamic environment. Setting the story in the Middle East brings a certain genre revival and an element of exoticism. The director is indeed searching for her own voice, but in practice, she evidently borrows from foreign influences, and the central theme of her film, the feeling of alienation, has appeared in vampire movies many times before. However, I was never bored, which is a pleasant change compared to Jarmusch's film Only Lovers Left Alive, which I perceive as a significant artistic defeat. Considering Jarmusch's position in world cinema and the fact that Amirpour is an outsider from whom no one expects anything, this was definitely not a waste of time. Overall impression: 60%. (03/25/2018)

A true café loafer knows that the vampire theme in cinema started long before Murnau and therefore knows that anything is possible. It's only in recent years that we've seen a very different approach to the genre each season. 2012 surprised with Byzantium, which saw the return of king Neil Jordan, who changed the vampire genre with the brilliant Interview with the Vampire back in 1994. Together with Anne Rice, he had vampires reviewed by Bram Stoker and Charles Dickens. 2013 had Only Lovers Left Alive and their undead talk from Elizabethan England, dark glasses, and musical instruments. And as a version reflecting 2014, we have A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - a gazing protagonist who has posters of Michael Jackson and Madonna and listens to Lionel Richie in her room. So who else is addressing what this girl is wearing and what country she is sucking the blood from her fellow citizens in? (01/10/2015)

An incredibly hollow movie. If, as suggested by the director herself, you’re hoping to find here any traces of F. W. Murnau, David Lynch, or – why not? – Sergio Leone, I wish you the best of luck! (05/29/2018)

An unbelievably poser bore that gave me cancer. On the one hand I'll grant that it had some thematic build to it and worked with the time and space it had, on the other hand there's an incredible amount of the usual "God it’s gotta be indie" errors. For example, half of the film is exposition that still somehow manages to keep things moving, create tension, and sustain suspense. The second half of the film consists of roughly four scenes, whose ten-minute running times are spent with the protagonists standing slowly and voicelessly in one spot, or sending postcards. The resulting experience of the film, and for me this is maybe the worst part, ultimately comes down to how much you like the music they use; as such, this film definitively represents that category of creative missteps where the uncompromising is replaced with the navel-gazing. This movie is Sex and the City for hipsters; may it wither and die. (04/29/2015)