A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

In a fictional Iranian ghost town called Bad City, a lonely young man meets a girl in a chador who skateboards at night and feeds on men who deserve it.

Ana Lily Amirpour made her first feature as a genuine hybrid: spaghetti western framing, a synth and post-punk soundtrack, and a vampire who is a feminist avenger in a country's imagined margins, all shot in stark monochrome in Bakersfield.

It is slow, cool and closer to Jarmusch than to horror, and the romance at its centre is played completely straight.

Sheila Vand is extraordinary, and the sequence in which she follows a boy home while a mirror ball turns is one of the most beautiful things in recent independent film.

The cat gets the last shot and steals the film.