In one stunning shot from writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature, a young Iranian man named Arash (Arash Marandi) has become fascinated with a mysterious, unnamed woman (Sheila Vand), unaware that she is in fact an honest-to-fangs vampire. In her apartment, she stands to the right of the frame, a disco ball spinning sparkles of light as the music pounds and Arash approaches her. Will she kiss him? Will she kill him? The arc of that single shot is masterful, and Amirpour finds plenty of other arresting images on the way to an effectively allegory for a patriarchal society confronted with a powerful female force. What’s missing is a tighter, more controlled script, one that wrangles its various threads—drug abuse and organized crime, modernism vs. conservatism in contemporary Iran—into something genuinely powerful, or gives even slightly more clarity to the interior lives of both Arash and the vampire. But it’s hard to complain too much about something this visually striking in its black-and-white compositions, and one that concludes with a young man making a choice between the past and the future in another amazingly crafted single shot. By Scott Renshaw