Jawnts: A vampire flick with atmosphere and then some

Vampire movies can have many virtues, but subtlety is rarely one of them. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, by Iranian American writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour, is no exception.

The town is called Bad City, the tattooed pimp is monomaniacally villainous, the male hero drives the coolest possible car (a Ford Thunderbird coupe), and the local sex worker will be familiar if you've watched a movie with a world-weary prostitute.

But if the unnamed vampire at the heart of the film isn't particularly subtle, she is undeniably original. Played by Sheila Vand, she stalks the alleys of Bad City in a striped top (like Jean Seberg in Breathless) and a black chador that flies behind her like a cape when she skateboards down the street.

Amirpour doesn't indulge in exposition or, really, much of a narrative. But she doesn't need to. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a rapturously mesmerizing movie and it doesn't need to explain why there's a pit of corpses outside town that no one seems to notice. Everyone in the film speaks Farsi, but they live in a sparsely populated oil town that seems to have no government or authority of any kind (despite the ominous Big Brotheresque posters that blanket the area).

If the movie is short on story, it goes long on style. It's shot in striking black and white, and Vand and her maybe-paramour, the James Deanish Arash Marandi, are great fun to watch - partially because they are both absurdly attractive and profoundly cool (kind of like Seberg and her Jean-Paul Belmondo). The movie is stuffed with eye-catching visual details - that flowing chador - and extended, almost dialogue-less sequences where synthy pop music pulses to their stylized flirtations.

The cinematography and setting of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is slightly reminiscent of the Sin City franchise, but Amirpour succeeds where those pulpy, hyperviolent nightmares founder. There is brief nudity, some explicit drug use, and a splash of grotesque violence, but she isn't interested in lurid excess, except when it comes to length; A Girl Walks clocks in near the two-hour mark. The minimalist but impossibly hip early movies of many art-house filmmakers - Breathless, Eraserhead, Stranger Than Paradise - are about 90 minutes for a good reason.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is scheduled to play at the Ritz at the Bourse, 400 Ranstead St., from Feb. 27 to March 5.