The Cinematheque

“Exhilaratingly unsettling … Funny, scary, and brilliantly cinematic.”

Geoff Andrew, Time Out

“This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.” David Lynch drives that sentiment—uttered by a sexed-up, against-type Laura Dern—to its extreme in this savage follow-up to his controversial masterwork Blue Velvet. A polarizing Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, and an unforeseen return to literary adaptation following the debacle of Dune, Lynch’s feverish rendering of Barry Gifford’s novel sets violent-offender Sailor (an Elvis-cosplaying Nicolas Cage) on a parole-breaking road trip across the Deep South with his bad-girl ingénue sweetheart Lula (Dern). Doggedly determined to keep them apart is Lula’s unhinged mother (Diane Ladd, Dern’s actual mother), the Wicked Witch to Lula’s Dorothy in the film’s postmodern embrace of The Wizard of Oz. ​“A picture about finding love in hell,” said the director, Wild at Heart prefigured the dial turn on sex and violence that would become de rigueur in the Tarantino age. Willem Dafoe nearly steals the movie as a nightmarish ghoul in a bolo tie.