A thick cloud of menace hangs over David Lynch’s brilliant, nightmarish creep-fest. What begins as a story of a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) who receive mysterious videotapes showing static shots of the outside of their house suddenly escalates into violence, murder, and madness.
Lost Highway has the crazed logic of a bad dream, though unlike any you’ve ever had: characters re-appear in different bodies; a man in a prison cell becomes someone else; a grinning, chalk-faced Robert Blake keeps popping up like a demented gnome. The Lynchian universe, with its muted walls, pale girls with black fingernails and extraordinary sound design, is unique and unnerving.
Watching the film is like pressing a seashell to one ear while someone sticks a gun in the other. Just the simple act of Bill Pullman receding into the shadows of his bedroom can fill you with inexplicable dread.
This new 4K restoration, supervised by David Lynch, is flawless. Every scene vibrates with weird intensity.
What’s so interesting is that, with some films, the movie get easier to understand the more you see it. But every time I watch Lost Highway (and I revisit it regularly) it gets even more cracked and confounding. Of course, Robert Blake’s real-life courtroom drama makes him even more frightening now, that’s for sure. But it’s Lynch’s unique nightmare logic that pulsates behind every frame. I always leave this movie dazzled and deeply disturbed. And in complete awe of its mad genius.
Lost Highway opens June 24 at Lincoln Center.