by Jason Adams
Watching A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night one's immediate thought might be of a shark, of a Jaws fin splitting the surface, as The Girl (Sheila Vand) skateboards down the inky Iranian streets of Bad Town, her chador trailing behind her like a nighttime tidal-wave no one can escape. A bit of Mephisto in Murnau's Faust too, whose sky-wide wings blot out the sun above that small smoky German village, rooftops only ankle-high, cartoonish and akimbo. There's Caligari brushed over this Bad Town -- the smokestacks and power stations, train cars, flat as a painted flap of cardboard. Sin City Expressionism against which our ageless hunter swerves, preys on all manner of beast, man, fat cat alike.
But there's so much more to The Girl and how Vand brilliantly paints her -- she might be an Instant Icon of Neo-Western Horror but she's also kind of just a girl, standing in front of a boy... asking him to like her. And to drive a white-hot needle through her earlobes. Same diff, in the right boy's hands anyway. Besides the images of soulless monsters that Vand summons up at will she infuses this Girl with Teen Heart, a teenybopper bedroom wall of what's super cool at Sweet Sixteen -- she nudges at cuteness with the tip of her nose, wetly curious.
In that way there's an aura of Eli, the humanity-fascinated succubus that Lina Leandersson so vividly sprung to un-life in 2006's Swedish masterpiece Let the Right One In, here as well -- Vand's Girl, for all her shadowy arch-angel posturing, is melancholy want looking for a target; she just needed somebody to offer her a hug, damn it. Director Ana Lily Amirpour has said this film was borne of her own loneliness and Vand, her moody stand-in in voluminously smudged eyeliner, paints nothing sharper than that, her eyes cutting past their spaced-out carnivorous longings to flesh out an even deeper need of the heart, a tremulous half-heard echo of a thump.
Ultimately what became my favorite cinematic compatriot to understand what Vand was mounting here though was when I sussed out the "No-Face" water spirit of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away in her, with a pale white face floating above a billowing lake of black -- No-Face too was threatening, but also misunderstood. See how the both of them offer up handfuls of shiny bling in exchange for connection, at least until a kind soul finally comes through with more? And from there the humanity in that interaction becomes their new choice food -- it's a whole new world with just a little love and understanding to sink one's ancient teeth into.
