In 2014, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was the vampire movie we didn’t know we needed: Strange, uneasy, beautiful, a genre-mixing fever dream, it felt like something new, but also something inevitable. Of course there are vampires like this. Of course there should be movies like this. Why can’t we have more of them?
Amirpour’s followup, The Bad Batch, was a messy cannibal dystopia that didn’t live up to her debut. Since then, she’s directed episodes of Legion and Castle Rock, and she has an episode in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Her next feature, though, once again looks like something else entirely. Would you like some neon, a dash of mind control, and Kate Hudson playing against type? Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon has all of this and more.
Some weird shit is going to happen. Bonnie (Hudson) can feel it in her ovaries. She befriends Mona Lisa (Jun Jong-seo), who has escaped from a mental institution and who clearly has some kind of superpowers. What this unlikely pair is going to get up to is not totally clear, but it seems to involve making enough money and causing enough chaos that they catch the eye of a cop (Craig Robinson) who may be in over his head.
Nothing here is subtle, and that seems to be the point. The movie also stars Ed Skrein (Deadpool), whose character’s name is Fuzz, and Evan Whitten (young Elliot on Mr. Robot). Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski has some experience with the weird and freaky; he shot Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar.
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon will be in theaters and on demand on September 30th—which, sadly, is not a full moon.
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