The Cinematheque

“In its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece.”

Calum Marsh, The Village Voice

David Lynch’s feature-length prequel to his and Mark Frost’s seminal ​’90s television series must surely rank among the greatest critical about-faces in recent memory. Savaged by reviewers upon release—“It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be,” snarked The New York Times​’s Vincent Canby—Fire Walk with Me is now considered one of Lynch’s canonical achievements. In retrospect, the hostility can be appreciated: returning to a cast of curio characters left dangling after a cliffhanger series finale, Lynch opted to backtrack then retread what was already solved in the show’s central mystery, swapping humour and soap-opera camp with gutting brutality and adult content. A death-march depiction of the final days in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee, in a tour-de-force turn), Fire Walk with Me is the director’s brilliant and sobering reminder that, beneath its amusingly off-kilter veneer, Twin Peaks was a show about a teenage daughter’s rape and murder.

Advisory: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me includes scenes of sexual violence.

“Driven by phantasmagoric imagery, the dramatic ferocity of Sheryl Lee, and Angelo Badalamenti’s score, the result is the very definition of what we’ve come to think of as Lynchian, and is his most humane masterpiece.”

Andrew Simpson, BFI