Law of Extraction: Transcultural Environments, Uncanny Subjects, and the “Unresolved Question of Pleasure” in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

Promoted at its Sundance premiere as “the first Iranian vampire spaghetti western film,” Ana Lily Amirpour’s first feature-length film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014), is, more accurately, an American film set in an imagined Iran. Shot in Taft, California with a Persian script, Girl is a unique form of transcultural expressionism. The film depicts a transcultural landscape, where cultures, characters, and environments are at once entangled and isolated, where violence and intimacy coexist as strategies for survival, and where the law of extraction—the impulse to consume—is set against the law of attraction—the force of being drawn to another.