Thoughts from the committee
In Ana Lily Amirpour’s third feature, she continues to make the most of her creatively lucrative niche: a cool-as-hell exploitation mashup in which a young woman seeks righteous vengeance against a dystopian backdrop.
Like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon takes place in a ‘Bad City’, albeit one slightly less fictionalised than that film’s crumbling Iranian landscape. Here, it is New Orleans, scuzzier and more neon-drenched than ever before. Mona Lisa (Jeon Jong-seo of Burning fame) has been imprisoned in an insane asylum but manages to use her latent psychic abilities to escape. She proceeds to go on a nocturnal odyssey through the Big Easy, running into characters like a pugnacious stripper (Kate Hudson), a rapping white boy (Ed Skrein) and a relentless cop (Craig Robinson).
If you thought Amirpour’s earlier films were slight, Mona Lisa is unlikely to change your mind. Her lane is much more Jim Jarmusch than Park Chan-wook. But few early-career filmmakers have shown such adeptness at the stylish genre remix. If you give into the disparate visual and aural references that Amirpour draws from, you’ll find this film endlessly compelling. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is (if you’ll excuse me) a veritable gumbo of treasure and trash.
“Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a lark, a contradiction — a lurid, violent, caught-in-the-gutter movie that’s also a nimble and knowing tall tale for adults.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety