Critics reviews

Lynch brings the movie’s febrile and violent artifice to life in visual compositions of a poised, painterly authority and interrupts them with quick bursts of hallucinatory frenzy. The movie’s prime drama is metafictional—a display of the exhilarations and delusions of a life like the director’s own, one spent reprising this genre’s lurid tales, fashions, and images.

The plotting, with its inexplicably metamorphosed protagonist and its various doubles, makes one suspect Lynch may be having us on. It's ironic, then, that narrative is the most intriguing thing about the film, leading us either to dismiss it as pretentious rubbish or to try to make sense of it on a metaphorical level. Fortunately, Lynch's mastery of mood through sound, space, decor and lighting means that we're more or less engrossed throughout, even though some of the sillier moments - not to mention the uncharacteristically clumsy use of music - try one's patience.

With its lack of deep focus and threateningly ambient sound design, Lost Highway is a defiantly oneiric work, albeit one that attempts to reconcile these abstractions with the legacy of the most idiosyncratic of noir, actively referencing oddities like Kiss Me Deadly and Angel Face to comprise its decidedly singular tone.

Lost Highway... is the least accomplished of Lynch's unofficial Los Angeles trilogy, but also an important thematic precursor to the later installments.

[The way station] is neither heaven nor hell, and maybe not even purgatory: Lynch is showing us a dream realm that at times looks like just another Los Angeles noir story, but pushes on into the larger Mysteries, and we keep driving on into them, swallowed up by the bloody path.

David Lynch loves to play in the dark. His longtime cinematographer Frederick Elmes once remarked that "with David, my job is to determine how dark we're talking about." There's sort-of-dark, and really-dark, and pitch-black-dark; all of these kinds and more are put to gripping use in LOST HIGHWAY... To ignore LOST HIGHWAY is to discount some of Lynch's most indelible moments.

Lost Highway is Lynch at his most daring, emotional, and personal. It hasn’t achieved the same attention that his other films have, though it makes a fitting companion piece to, and inversion of, Mulholland Drive. It’s so easy to describe the harrowing, somnambulistic, maladroit tone of Lynch’s films as a dissociative fugue. But when his work genuinely connects, even at its most bizarre, he’s one of our most pointedly realistic filmmakers. To understand the emotional realism in Lynch’s work is, in fact, to understand the emotional realism of poetry.

In "Lost Highway," David Lynch dabbles in spooky, chilly implication and a sort of hip incoherence... This is a head scratcher, all right. And Lynch, who wrote this with Barry Gifford (who wrote the novel "Wild at Heart," which Lynch also adapted), doesn’t seem hard pressed to explain it.

Lost Highway could have stood some final trimming -- some passages seem to go on endlessly, pointlessly -- but you get the feeling the director just likes to make you squirm. Confounding and disconcerting, Lost Highway is David Lynch consciously attempting to outdo himself. He does, gloriously, and in doing so loses the rest of us in the process.

By no means a meditative work in the sense that Eraserhead is, Lost Highway is defined less by visual and aural textures than by narrative flow, assaulting the viewer with a battery of effects. If Lynch hasn't developed his themes one iota in a quarter of a century, the mastery of sound and image on display here hasn't been seen or heard since Blue Velvet.

David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” is like kissing a mirror: You like what you see, but it’s not much fun, and kind of cold. It’s a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I’ve seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it. To try is to miss the point. What you see is all you get.

In Lost Highway, the plugs have been pulled, and what’s left is a misanthropic cackle that echoes in the void. It’s distressing to think that Blue Velvet was the climax of Lynch’s hopeful phase, that his view of humanity has been downhill from there. It’s not that the vision here is so bleak, but that it’s so reductive, and that it leads nowhere. Lost Highway is Eraserhead without the wonder...