As we gear up for another Venice Film Festival, a project premiering at last year’s edition will finally get a release next month. A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and The Bad Batch director Ana Lily Amirpour’s latest film, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, follows a struggling single mother (Kate Hudson) who befriends a mysterious mental institute escapee with supernatural powers (Jun Jong Seo). She sees a lucrative opportunity to make some fast cash, but when they draw the attention of a detective (Craig Robinson), their luck starts to run out as the cops close in on their crime spree. Now set for a September 30 release digitally and in theaters, the first trailer has landed.
David Katz said in his review, “The way her career is headed, soon we’ll be able to collate an Ana Lily Amirpour map of the United States. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night was set in a fantasized Iran––the country of her family heritage––although the most Californian sun and tarmac-parched Iran you could imagine. The Bad Batch was her Texan border town cannibal freakout––where out-of-commission ‘90s Hollywood stars like Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves wandered the Mad Maxian wastelands. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (a twee title for a film with serious bite) takes one of the most touristically fetishized parts of the US––New Orleans––as its milieu and playground. It doesn’t quite shed the sense of an outsider looking in, extracting the most photogenic and Instagrammable parts for an artfully scuzzy collage, but the emerging theme of Amirpour’s work is actually that of outsider-dom, depicted in a way that’s honestly empowering. (The Bad Batch, in its treatment of physical disability, for instance, is one of the more body-positive films of its era.)”
See the trailer and poster below for the film also starring Ed Skrein, Evan Whitten and Craig Robinson.
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon arrives on September 30 in theaters and on VOD.