

We’re never quite sure what Vand’s character wants or how she feels about the people around her, which infuses every scene she shares with another character with palpable tension.
#Love at first bite streaming movie
A Girl Walks Home is that rare vampire movie that actually makes the Twilight scenario of “Will the vampire eat their beloved?” work.

Her face projects a withdrawn, submissive air - a kind of false meekness that makes her a genuinely unnerving presence. Whereas Dracula oozes European charm and licentiousness, Vand’s Girl is cool and diffident. We see what happens to the people who say no. when she corners a little boy in an alleyway and asks him “Are you a good boy? Are you a good boy or not?” with a voice so hard-edged it could cleave a diamond. Shot in southern California, Amirpour and cinematographer Lyle Vincent use Kern County's churning oil rigs and the Mojave desert to create a bleak, industrial environment around the city.Įvery vampire has their type, and for Vand, her go-to blood donors are Bad Men. While Amirpour sprinkles in a few details to give Bad City some local flavor - characters flavor their tea with misri sticks, they watch Iranian TV, Arash pulls off a robbery by using cultural expectations of modesty (“What if your parents knew you were alone in your room with a boy?”) to get his target out of the way - her film feels like it could be set anywhere.īad City is an instantly recognizable noir landscape, a place where prostitutes dream of saving up enough money to get out, and hipsters wearing standard-issue Springsteen white T’s & jeans blow their savings on pristine Ford Thunderbirds. Set in an Iranian locale called Bad City, Amirpour’s film traces the relationship that forms between Sheila Vand’s Girl and Arash Marandi’s Arash. We know how how a vampire is supposed to look and act - Count Dracula in 2020’s BBC production - but that's not the case here, making it one of the best genre movies of the decade. But part of what makes director Ana Lily Amirpour’s “vampire spaghetti Western” - her 2014 debut - so exciting is how it subverts our expectations. They mask their faces with high collars and wrap their bodies in capes that encircle them like a pair of bat wings at rest.ĭraped in a black chador, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’s vampire only looks to be cut from the same cloth. picking off superstitious peasants under the cover of night.
