A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night debuted at this year's Sundance to effusive praise, and for apparently good reason: aside being the first feminist Iranian vampire Western film in history, it looks like a gorgeous piece even from the trailer, subverting the helpless vampire-victim narrative with super-deep subthemes and crisp shots.
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, the film is set in Bad City, a fictional ghost town in Iran inhabited by night people—junkies, prostitutes, and a vampire, of course, a lonely woman in hijab (played by Sheila Vand) who preys on misogynist d-bags who would take her for weak or submissive. There's apparently a love story in here too, with Arash Marandi as the cool, bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold—all elements that evoke the dark, quiet vampire film Let the Right One In, though the political context of present-day Iran seems like a more interesting backdrop for a feminist vampire film than, you know 2008 Stockholm. (No disrespect to Stockholm.) Music, too, seems to play an important element in A Girl Walks Home at Night—Arabic punk, a Madonna poster in the background, a Morricone-inspired score—music makes feminist revenge more fun, no?
A Girl Walks Home at Night opens November 21 in New York and Los Angeles and wide thereafter.