Cool is such a shit word. Once you get past the stage of your life where social hierarchy is determined by where you sit on the bus, cool becomes pretty much defunct. But, if ever there was to be a definition of cool it would be this film.

It’s the type of film that would chain smoke and wear leather jackets and show you the best night of your life. It’s the most original vampire film I’ve ever seen; a tale about a skateboard-riding, blood-sucking Iranian lady vampire with no name and the empty streets that make up her broken town.

The Farsi dialogue and Iranian setting are fuelled by an unmistakably American (the youth and aspiration America rather than the school shootings and drone strikes one) tone to add to the selection of influences and gives the film a paradoxically unique universality. There is a timelessness to the setting, a black and white backdrop of the indefinite and the surreal against which these broken people are portrayed.

It’s tempting to try and cast the titular vamp as a sort of feminist hitman but any attempt to read morality or ideology into the film cheapens it. Director Ana Lily Amirpour has instead created a film that is confident in itself. It offers no explanation as to why there’s a vampire on a skateboard or why there’s a random person dancing with a balloon. The film isn’t concerned with questions or origins; instead it offers a portrayal of suffering and sensitivity in the starkly beautiful wasteland it inhabits.

The lead couple are also a genuine masterclass in understatement. They are the absolute anti-Twilight. Instead of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart looking like they’d rather shoot cyanide than talk to each other, we’re offered silences and snatches of Farsi that create an intimacy and tension that’s nihilistically engrossing. Their first meeting has more charm to it than anything I’ve seen in my entire life and they barely even speak.

The unspoken romance they have is woven between spots of violence and unsettlingly intense scenes to create a mash-up of experiences, the individual suffering underpinned by the sheer viscerality of scenes in which you watch a father unravel in his heroin addiction and a pimp get his throat torn out to a techno soundtrack.

This film stands as something boldly and knowingly original, understated romance balanced with heroin and a child menacing vampire to create a genuinely beautiful portrayal of fractured people and their directionless world.

@CamHill1234