Lost Highway

Lost Highway (1996)

A film by David Lynch

Lost Highway

This is Lynch's most baffling, perplexing and complex movie so far, and even though I have seen it many times I still can't really explain it decisively, but here is the basic story. Saxophone player Fred Madison (superbly played by Bill Pullman) hears a voice on his door intercom saying, "Dick Laurent is dead", and he also receives a video tape showing footage of his house. Along with his wife Renee (fine performance from Patricia Arquette) he goes to a party, and while there encounters the Mystery Man (an eerie Robert Blake) who tells Fred he is at his house right now, and Fred speaks to him on the phone.

Shortly after this we vaguely see Renee being murdered, and Fred is convicted of this and sentenced to death. While in prison Fred starts to have headaches, and one night he contorts and changes into another man, Pete (Balthazar Getty), a mechanic with a criminal record; who is then let out of prison and meets a gangster named Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent, who has a moll named Alice, who is identical to Fred's wife Renee. Then Pete has a fling with Alice, and after this the Mystery Man turns up at Mr Eddy's/Dick Laurent's side. Then Pete turns back into Fred, and I won't go on any further.

If you haven't seen this film do so now, because that is the only way to take it all in, on its own terms, and not by someone trying to explain it. It is a very thorough exploration into our ambiguous identities, and delves deep into a dreamlike, subconscious state.

"Asserts an all American, surburban-puritan belief in the idiosyncratic eyewitness and the visionary, the truth of an individual viewpoint and even of messianic derangement, while all the while conveying almost wearily that such subjectivity as idealised elsewhere has entered terminal decline." - Marina Warner, Sight and Sound

"The most radical, dreamlike and complicated film David Lynch has made." - Derek Malcolm, Guardian