by David Lynch, 1997.
Starring: Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Bill Pullman.
Rating: 7.5/10, 9/10.
Nobody seems to like Lost Highway very much, and I understand that. I mean, to most people it might seem like something of a mess, with inexplicable and unexplained murders, with characters suddenly turning into other characters and then back again, with no clear plotline, and so on. But I really like it. Why? Who knows?
A couple (Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman) are living a peaceful but subtly tension-filled life in their nice house. One day they find a video in an envelope on their front stairs. They watch the video; it shows the front of their house. The next day they get another one, this one starting like the other but then moving inside. They call the police, but nothing comes of it. The next video shows the woman’s dead, bloody body on the floor of their bathroom with the man standing over it. Did this murder even happen? Well, in the next scene the man is being arrested for it.
From there things get stranger, like when, in his jail cell, Bill Pullman turns into Balthazar Getty (who has the sexiest back of all time, just thought I’d mention). Since the police can’t explain why a completely different person just showed up in the jail cell, they let him go. It’s all very bizarre.
And yet, it all seems to make some kind of sense to me. Not in any way I can explain, but on some sort of instinctive, intuitive level, it works. It just feels right. Very right. This isn’t my favorite Lynch film, but it may be the most immediately emotionally satisfying one.
So I’m definitely not reccommending this film to everyone. If you’ve seen other David Lynch films and liked them, try it out, see how you feel. If other David Lycnh films were too far out and weird for you, definitely do NOT see it. And if you’ve never seen any of his films, please don’t let this be your introduction. Start with Twin Peaks (if you have the time to devote to the thirty episodes and the movie), or Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive. Not this one.