Reviews by:
@thefoxgoestothemovies
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Wandering the desolate streets of Bad City Iran, she’s on the hunt for any bad men unfortunate enough to come her way. For she is a vampire. And she needs to feast.
It’s an astonishing feature film debut by Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour. Fresh and unexpected, she blends film genres so seamlessly that it’s hard to articulate correctly the type of film it is. Perhaps a vampire western? An existential love story steeped in loneliness and melancholia? A female revenge thriller? It’s all of the above, with references to David Lynch, Nicholas Ray and Wong Kar-Wai. Yet it’s far from derivative, heralding an exciting new voice in World Cinema.
It’s also arguably the most stylish and cool vampire film ever made. The Girl with her chador, riding her skateboard in the middle of the night like some dark avenger. But the chador also conveys a sinister meaning - an outsider who’s often silent until she’s ready to kill, she feels like a physical manifestation of our Islamophobia. It’s only when she meets Arash, with his James Dean looks and innocent naïveté, that she softens. And so we get a star-crossed romance, between an age-old vampire and a young man, with deep dark secrets that threaten to doom the pair. With a killer soundtrack and a black-and-white aesthetic, the film could have been too cool for school, an ironic piece of hipster pretence. But Amirpour shows great restraint, enabling us to organically care for the characters even when they do some unspeakable things. It’s a modern-day fairytale love story that speaks to the heart and the jugular.
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