The Cinematheque

“An elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else … Constructs an intricate puzzle out of dream logic, lurid eroticism, violence, shifting identities, and fierce intimations of doom.”

Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Dick Laurent is dead.” Untangling the mystery behind that cryptic message is just one of the deranged delights of Lost Highway, David Lynch’s terrifying, polarizing, Möbius-strip of a horror flick. Its bifurcated story, co-written by Barry Gifford (who penned the source material for Lynch’s Wild at Heart), begins straightforwardly enough: Fred (Bill Pullman), a jazz saxophonist who suspects his wife (Patricia Arquette) of infidelity, starts receiving ominous VHS tapes shot from inside the couple’s LA home. The mindfuckery commences when Lynch flips the lid and transforms Fred into a young​’50s-style greaser (Balthazar Getty) in deep with the mob and the mob boss’s wife (Arquette again). Sandwiched between the unfairly derided Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the much-exalted Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway feels like a delirium of Lynchian extremes: part Black Lodge horror, part neo-noir puzzle box. The zeitgeisty soundtrack was produced by, and features, Trent Reznor.