Starring Sheila Vand. In Farsi, with English subtitles. Rated 14A.

The phrase “a girl walks home alone at night” usually has a frightening ring to it, in a sadly familiar way. In mythical Bad City—where everyone speaks Farsi and dresses like they’re from other eras, and the oil pumps of the Los Angeles basin whir angrily in the background—it menaces for entirely different reasons.

Out in a black chador, the unnamed protagonist looks like Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus, but at home she prefers a striped pullover like the one Jean Seberg wore in Breathless. Her bedroom walls are covered with Madonna posters and other detritus from the ’80s. And, oh yeah, she drinks human blood on certain occasions, triggered by hazy encounters, mostly with men. Our toothsome antiheroine is angel of death, sister of mercy, all-seeing mother, and catlike vessel of pure desire, depending on the circumstances. She also steals a kid’s skateboard, and rides it.

It’s probably no happenstance that androgynous, shape-shifting Sheila Vand looks a lot like writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, an Iranian who grew up (skateboarding) in Southern California and here riffs impressively on the judgment of artists as cultural vampires. Working with cinematographer Lyle Vincent in wide-screen tones of squid black and nuclear white, she creates an exquisitely framed netherworld that draws fluidly on David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Aki Kaurismäki (not to mention Abbas Kiarostami).

It’s all shot through with extra jolts of gender and class confusion that read as universal while hitting touchstones of modern Iran, with the constant reminders of “women’s place” enough to get anyone’s fangs up. Elsewhere, Bad City is littered with men who bully others but surrender to their own addictions. And there are bodies actually littering a nearby ravine, not that anyone deems this worth mentioning.

Our lady of the night has her own notable weakness—and therefore another kind of strength—for the one man who sees no veils between them. Okay, maybe it doesn’t hurt that the leather-jacketed guy (Arash Marandi) looks like James Dean crossed with Grease-era John Travolta, and drives a dead-mint ’57 Thunderbird. With its Persian folk music and New Wave strangeness, this one-of-a-kind movie is an unforgettable essay on loneliness, exile, disappointment, and, oddly enough, the lure of the open road.