A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

This week’s Pageant Late Show (Friday and Saturday, 11 p.m.): Brit-born Iranian writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut is a welcome return to the vampire as a haunting figure of darkness rather than that of sparkly pop-fiction manqué. Bad City is a post-apocalyptic backwater cloaked in neo-noir darkness and baptized in blood, its flesh punctured by the fangs of oil derricks and slashed with dry riverbeds choked with corpses. The streets are patrolled by The Girl (Sheila Vand), who prowls the night dressed in a chador and a Breton stripe top; a Persian Audrey Hepburn with fangs. She’s an exterminating angel who eats bad men and scares small boys straight, but softens for broken women and wayward young men. One night, rolling down the predawn streets on a skateboard in a cloak flapping in the night breeze, The Girl is paused by the sight of a zonked-out Arash (Arash Marandi), a landscaper of Purgatory whose new sideline in dealing ecstasy goes astray when he samples his own wares at an underground rave before his meet-cute with The Girl. And then … Pageant Theatre. Not rated