Iranian vampire film sets high expectations

Ana Lily Amirpour delights in her debut feature.

Very few films come along that deserve to be called “original.” “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” the debut feature from young Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour, is one of them.

Shot in beautiful black and white, the film is set in the strangely deserted town of Bad City — where it looks like inland California (it was shot near Bakersfield), but the few inhabitants speak Persian. It’s a smart, subversive tip of the hat to everything from American and Italian Westerns to horror movies, Jim Jarmusch, love stories, Iranian traditionalism and rock ’n’ roll. Oh, and there’s a vampire.

Arash Marandi is Arash, a T-shirt-and-jeans guy whose pride and joy is wrapped up in his meticulously maintained ’50s-era Thunderbird. Too bad he has to live with his heroin-addicted dad (Marshall Manesh) and doesn’t seem to have any friends.

Dominic Rains (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”) is Saeed, the town drug dealer and pimp to whom Arash owes money. He decides to take the car as payment, leaving Arash without a key part of his identity.

Then there’s Girl (Sheila Vand), equally at home in a traditional chador or on a skateboard, whose biggest sin is that she’s lonely — and a vampire. She and Arash sort of meet cute — he’s on his way home from a costume party as Dracula, she is Dracula — but it’s a meeting full of tension and foreboding.

This is just one of the scenes where Amirpour plays with film language in unexpected ways.

The only snag with “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” is that it is such an assured and persuasive calling card that it sets up impossibly high expectations for whatever Amirpour does next.

Everyone should have such problems.