3.5 stars (out of 5)
Writer/director/producer Ana Lily Amirpour’s début feature (drawn from her 2011 short) is a strange, eerily compelling Persian-language vampire movie seemingly set in Iran but actually filmed in stark California locales, populated with unknown ex-pats and influenced by Tarantino, grunge, Spaghetti Westerns and romantic-cum-existential bloodsucker horror (but not Twilight!!!).
Arash (Arash Marandi channeling James Dean) lives in ‘Bad City’, drives a vintage car and spends much of his time defending his hopeless junkie Dad Hossein (Marshall Manesh) from nasty dealer Saeed (a wonderfully loathsome Dominic Rains with the word ‘SEX’ tattooed on his throat), to whom Hossein owes an awful lot of money. However, Arash’s fortunes change in dramatic fashion, and soon he (like many of the other characters here) meets the mysterious ‘The Girl’ (Sheila Vand), a child of the night dressed in a full chador and a striped skivvy who can stalk her victims silently but isn’t above shocking, taunting warnings (“I could pull your eyes right out of your skull and feed them to dogs!”). Perhaps as he’s dressed as Dracula after a costume party, possibly as he’s cute and maybe because he’s tripping, but The Girl doesn’t immediately put the bite on him, and soon Arash is dangerously smitten and prepared to forgive The Girl almost anything. Even being dead.
Elegantly filmed on a budget and in B+W, Amirpour’s dream-logic creeper has much to enjoy, from a cool soundtrack that takes in Iranian New Wave rock and classical Farsi chanting to witty dialogue (or at least witty subtitles) to straight scares to Arash’s amiably goofy performance. And Vand’s ‘Girl’ is one of the oddest vampires in recent movie history, an apparently ages-old figure who’s puzzled by a hamburger, learns to skateboard after stealing one from an unlucky kid, might be a Madonna fan and makes loud slurping noises while feeding.
I Wake Up Screening 