The Cinematheque

“Extraordinary, savagely uncompromised … One of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art.”

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“A woman in trouble.” The innocuous tagline to David Lynch’s most avant-garde, undilutedly Lynchian feature since Eraserhead gives scant indication of the epic fever dream the American surrealist has in store. A hallucinatory tour of a haunted-funhouse Hollywood, Lynch’s extra-outré follow-up to Mulholland Dr. stars Laura Dern as a past-prime actor offered the lead in a movie rumoured to be cursed. From there, a deluge of strangeness—doppelgängers, psycho killers, a rabbit sitcom,​“The Loco-Motion”—gushes forth in inscrutable succession. The spiralling, scriptless, nearly non-narrative film was Lynch’s first feature-length foray into digital video; shot handheld by the director (also editor, scorer, and sound designer), the experimental opus has a dirty DIY aesthetic summoning the darkest dimensions of home moviemaking. Excerpts from Lynch’s eerie web series Rabbits, featuring a costumed Naomi Watts, are incorporated. Lynch regulars Harry Dean Stanton and Grace Zabriskie appear.