The new film from Ana Lily Amirpour will keep the fans happy with the tale of mind-controlling waitress on the loose the French Quarter
Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour serves up heaped spoonfuls of B-movie thrills in Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, in which a supernatural teen wanders wild in New Orleans. If the film is finally more moony than masterpiece, it does more than enough to keep her fanbase onside. Amirpour’s first film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, was a vampire western; her second, The Bad Batch, a cannibal romance. On the menu this time: superhero gumbo. Grab a bowl and tuck in. Whatever you do, don’t look in the waitress’s eyes.
Jeon Jong-seo stars as Mona Lisa Lee, who exerts a form of hypnotic mind control that can make her enemies slap themselves, stab themselves or put a bullet in their own knees. She’s just busted out of the “Home For Mentally Insane Adolescents” where she’s been held for ten years, and now has to make sense of the world as she goes along. Seat belts are a puzzle and money is a foreign language. In one scene we see Mona gazing in abject mystification at an image of Donald Trump on TV – and this at least suggests that the girl is learning fast.