Set in an oil industry ghost town-like city in Iran, this movie, directed by newcomer Ana Lily Amirpour - an American of Iranian descent - is highly reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch's early style. Interestingly, in an interview between her and legendary producer/director Roger Corman on the DVD extras, she claims she's not much of a fan of Jarmusch. But as virtually everyone who studies film has pointed at the stylistic similarity, she's taking it as a compliment.

Like Jarmusch's work, the movie is shot in atmospheric black and white - and it works beautifully. The dialogue is all Persian (Farsi) - even though the movie was shot in America, standing in for Iran - and is subsequently sub-titled. However, this does not work against the film (whose strength is its visuals) at all, as the dialogue is at all times minimal and slow, thus making the reading easy and unobstructive to the fascinating camera work.

So, it's a horror movie. It's principal character is a Persian woman vampire - who stalks the town, robed in a black chador, which is quite an unsettling shadow to behold standing 10 feet away from a potential victim late at night. The events exist within a kind of imagined Iranian underworld of pimps, hookers, drug dealers and street urchins. Our vampire watches this dark town, at times slowly riding a skateboard down the street! When she interacts with people, she is unblinking, mostly un-verbal, and seems to be at all times appraising their circumstances and their worth.

Aside from the beautiful blocking shots and photography, a high point of the film is its use of sound effects, music (which sometimes references Morricone-like spaghetti westerns) and an impressive soundtrack of mostly modern pop music.

Any criticism of this movie (though it's more praised than not) seems to center around it being "style over substance" and "too slowly paced". Well, it is moody, that's for sure - and maybe too slow for many of today's horror fans, that's true - but there's no arguing that its greatest strength is its style.

Ana Lily Amirpour wrote and directed film. It was filmed in the USA but set in Iran and the cast speak Farsi.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is shot in black and white to give it a gritty but also an arty look. It is a low budget moody horror film set in Bad City, a wild west type town in Iran. A decadent badlands with strays, addicts, villains and brooding types listening to music, clubbing, fighting and looking for women. Arash is a young brooding guy who owns a Thunderbird. The car is taken away by a drug dealer because his drug addict father owed him money.

The drug dealer meets The girl who walks alone at night but she is no shrinking violet. She might be dressed in a black chador but she is a vampire who soon gets her fangs on the drug dealer and hunt for other victims.

Arash meets the girl and they seem to get along fine, he shows her vulnerability and compassion.

The film is ponderous, there is a lot of music being listened to, lots of moody shots, it is very consciously arty. I thought the film might be making a political metaphor for Iranian society but it is hard to tell.

At the end Arash and the girl drive off in the Thunderbird, I just felt they drove away sooner.

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT interested me because I'd never seen an Iranian film before, let alone an Iranian horror film. I've since discovered that this was actually filmed in California, albeit in Persian language. It's sadly an extremely pretentious, art-house style movie that tells an overly-familiar storyline in an overly-familiar way. The whole 'Iranian' thing is made up in order to draw attention from the critics, otherwise this would have been instantly lost amid a welter of similar imagination-free Z-grade fare.

It's the sort of film that riffs and pays homage to lots of old film genres, with westerns being the most predominant. The crisp black and white photography aside, this is an art-house bore for the most part; the characters might dress in different attire and use a different language, but they're just the same as in a similar Hollywood film. The whole film has a Western look and feel to it so you might as well just be watching a Hollywood movie. A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT has no real character or bite; it merely consists of long, drawn out moody scenes and the occasional bit of blood-letting. I hated it.