MONA LISA BLOOD MOON is the kind of okay film I wish was better

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 "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" is the kind of brilliant film that instantly turns its director into a star. Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature is stylish, has a number of very nice horror set pieces, and it somehow manages to be both a clever inversion of horror tropes and a meaningful commentary on the state of Iranian women and societal decay. Her follow up films, "The Bad Batch" and "Mona Lisa And The Blood Moon", are stylish. I wish they were something more, because Amirpour is weird and exciting and Hollywood needs that. But I don't think they are.

 Distributed by small time Saban Films in a few independent theaters for a few weeks, "Mona Lisa" starts off strong enough. We see a girl with psychic mind control powers escape a mental institution, with plenty of good gore and fun camera work, and the movie just kind of is that for the rest of the run time. The film's opening sequence is by far the best bit of horror here. The "Jaws" zoom signaling her using her powers is a lot of fun at the start, when you don't fully realize what's happening, but Amirpour uses the exact same zoom every time Mona Lisa uses her powers, so by the end I was mostly bored of it. The opening minutes give us a self-inflicted stabbing-to-death via toe clippers. Amirpour has fun with it. But that's similarly the peak of the blood. 

 Does anything stand out? Ed Skrein plays "Spring Breakers" James Franco and has plenty of fun with it. It's a unique character, in the sense that he's presented as a sort of predator but ultimately ends up as the only person in the movie who doesn't betray or selfishly use Mona Lisa. The core plot, a domestic drama where stripper Kate Hudson selfishly uses Mona Lisa's talents for financial gain while her precocious young son with the psychological awareness of a smart adult becomes Mona Lisa's first real friend, is kind of blah for me. The actors are all fine, none of the story beats feel too cloying, but it's all been done before and Amirpour isn't able to do it in a super interesting manner. Reshape that sentence a bit and you have the whole movie; it's all just barely good enough to not let you realize how little is there until you leave the theater.

⭐⭐⭐

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