BOSTON — A girl walks home alone at night in writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour’s latest, return-to-form outing “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon.” In the first 15 minutes, Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”) reminds us why she is one of our most talented filmmakers.
The elements might be described as Tarantino 101: a young Asian woman (Jeon Jong-seo) in a straitjacket languishes inside a padded cell, there’s a bed with restraints, an abusive nurse (Lauren Bowles), a secret power the young woman possesses, blood. Those things, plus a marvelous score by Daniele Luppi (“Magic City”), invoking 1970s Italian B-movies, and a cast that kicks butt are the formula for an explosive, startlingly cinematic, opening sequence. The rest of the film does not disappoint.
We and Mona Lisa, clad in a loosened straitjacket and a pair of gifted-by-junkies high-tops, are off to the races. The Asian girl with the hidden superpower is headed to New Orleans to seek whatever. Like the lonely Iranian girl vampire in “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” the protagonist of “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon” is a true original. We don’t know anything about her except that her name is Mona Lisa Lee, that she ended up in a straitjacket and an “insane asylum for adolescents.”
