A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Billed as an ‘Iranian vampire western’, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is an exercise in cool that eschews a strong narrative in favour of style and homage.

Though the work of a vibrant authorial voice, it’s let down by nods to genre forebears like Sergio Leone that, while unmistakably fond, are often rather clumsily evoked. While Leone was all about stillness and tension, A Girl... lingers on things without Leone’s grasp of story, the characters often nonchalant and oblique, instead of spilling over with pathos.

Still, there are some wonderfully stark images in the film. A vampire, at night, on a skateboard, wearing a chador, fleetingly evokes the uncanny movement of Lynch’s camera, and the stark, unsettling imagery of Dreyer’s Vampyr.