The semblance of style is applied to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night in the dreams of pre-production and the desperation of post-production. The intentions are all there, though the means are not, and what meagre means are there are employed in the service of as shallow a hipster experience as they come, almost. To give Ana Lily Amirpour her due, she decorates her sparse ideas with a committed, consistent approach, and the film's process of defying our preconceptions and then reconfiguring them is understated and curiously involving - we're being duped, and we enjoy it. But that, and a flimsy core idea about finding and embracing one's own position within a hostile society, is about all the thematic or narrative substance that A Girl Walks Home has going for it. Amirpour's attention is otherwise solely devoted to honing her style, which is itself thin and deeply derivative. That new indie trope, a perversion of these films' forbears and immediate inspirations, of borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, creating supposed originality out of a collage of other artists' works, is one I may never wholly subscribe to. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, so comically bare and slow (the incessant slow-motion is close to sleep-inducing), hardly has an original stylistic notion in its dozy little head; that Amirpour's references are not only relentless but unconscionably 'cool' only compounds the tiresome, laughable laziness that lies behind them.
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