D/S: Ana Lily Amirpour. P: Justin Begnaud, Sina Sayyah, Elijah Wood. Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Dominic Rains, Mozhan Marnò, Rome Shadanloo. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Studiocanal.

Set in “Bad City” – a presumably fake conurbation in Iran – A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is the first vampire movie to be shot in the Persian language; thankfully, this novel ethnic angle isn’t the sole original aspect to the film. Director Ana Lily Amirpour (shooting in high-contrast black-and-white ‘scope) goes for a deadpan blend of early Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki, actually besting the former’s own recent foray into the undead realm (the unforgivably lazy Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013), in this affecting, melancholic, sometimes comic vampire romance. Arash (Arash Marandi), our main protagonist – gardener, handyman and Persian James Deanalike – lives with his junkie father (plus cat) in a crime-ridden slum, preyed on by a vicious local drug-dealer who crosses a line when he takes Arash’s new car, a flashy American convertible, to cover his dad’s debt. Luckily for Arash, the dealer is soon dispatched, not by a rival lowlife but by the local vampire, a nameless predator known only as The Girl (Sheila Vand). Clad in a burqa-like cape and headscarf, the Girl roams the streets at night in search of blood, occasionally branching out to deliver dubious moral guidance to young kids. When the Girl and Arash finally meet – he dressed as Dracula and high on E, a combination that seems to intrigue her – an unlikely romance blossoms. Can the Girl resist her baser inclinations and find true happiness with a living human being?

With her big, soulful eyes and gamin build, Sheila Vand makes an appealingly vulnerable and sexy bloodsucker. (Out of her cape, she could be a French New Wave heroine.) Amirpour strikes a nice balance between the iconic and the parodic, especially in her vampire’s choice of transportation: in shots that cheekily reference Cocteau and Bava, the Girl glides the streets on a purloined skateboard, burqa flapping behind her like wings. Bad City, shown mostly at night, is a mixture of inner-city desolation and suburban affluence. Streetlights blaze like miniature suns, casting eerie night-time shadows. Empty car lots resemble seas of black tarmac. A freight train rumbles slowly past a brightly-lit power station, where grey plumes of steam rise into the night sky. The cast is uniformly fine, even down to the cat (one of those rare horror-movie moggies, incidentally, to survive to the end credits unscathed). And the music – an eclectic selection of songs and instrumental pieces, cherry-picked from the director’s own record collection – is tremendous. Especially good are the tracks by Federale, glorious Morricone tributes full of pounding drumbeats, electric guitar twangs and soaring vocals; any heart left unstirred deserves a swift staking. Recommended.