Summary: 7/10: A stylized, slow-burning vampire Western and feminist revenge fantasy; Sheila Vand's mesmerizing performance and Amirpour's distinctive visual language and sound overcome occasional pacing issues to create something genuinely original.
What happens when you cross a spaghetti western, a graphic novel, Iranian New Wave cinema, and a vampire film, then shoot it in black and white in a California town standing in for a fictional Iranian ghost town called Bad City? You get a genuinely original filmmaking voice.
Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature, promoted as "the first Iranian vampire Western," follows a chador-cloaked vampire played by Sheila Vand, who glides through Bad City's desolate streets on a skateboard, preying on men who mistake her silence for vulnerability. The twist here is that she's kind of a nice girl - just not to bad people. Drug dealers, pimps, men who abuse women: these are her preferred diet. When she meets Arash, a young man with James Dean charm stuck in a dead-end life, something shifts. The film becomes a romance, or at least the ghost of one.
Amirpour, who is a singer and DJ, created a really eclectic, and genuinely fun soundtrack. The sound design is playful and precise. It's essential to how the film works. Every sound edit is perfectly placed: cigarette inhalations crackle, the constant offscreen rumble of trains suggests at once the repetitive boredom of daily life and the possibility of a way out.
Vand's performance anchors everything. Playing a non-communicative vampire could easily become mannered, but Vand finds the humanity in the monster, the loneliness in the predator. She makes you believe that a creature who has lived for untold years could still be surprised by kindness, still choose mercy over appetite when someone proves they deserve it. The scene where Arash, high on ecstasy and dressed as Dracula, encounters the actual vampire is both hilarious and oddly tender.
This film requires patience. It goes in for long unbroken shots and deliberately paced scenes, and there are moments when the careful choreography tips into self-consciousness. But when it works, and it works more often than not, the film achieves something genuinely distinctive. It's a film about outsiders made by an outsider, a vampire story that uses the genre to explore loneliness, desire, and what justice looks like when the law has abandoned you.
