Lost Highway (1997)

"...thoroughly surreal...[Lost Highway] is more of one piece than Fire Walk with Me and less desperate and jokey than Wild at Heart.  Andy Klein, Dallas Observer
"...delightfully bonkers; an eerie and edgy outpouring that makes Twin Peaks look like Moonlighting.  Christopher Hemblade, Empire
"...a weird movie, in that spooky/sicko, deadpan way that Lynch's movies always are...  Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle
"...unusually bizarre...ventures deeper into the nearly psychotic supernatural than any feature Lynch has previous overseen.  James Berardinelli's ReelViews
"...a compelling erotic nightmare.  Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

Editor's Note Director David Lynch ups the weird ante with this "psychological fugue." Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a jazz saxophonist who is married to the beautiful Renee (a brown-haired Patricia Arquette). After receiving menacing videotapes taken from inside their home, the couple begin to worry. Fred's fear is compounded when he meets a mysterious man (Robert Blake) at a flamboyant party. Fred wakes up to discover that Renee has been murdered, and Fred is convicted of the crime. Trouble is, he doesn't remember anything from that night. Sitting in a jail cell, he undergoes a miraculous transformation, waking up as Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a young mechanic. When Pete meets a dangerous client's sexy girlfriend, Alice Wakefield (a blonde Arquette), a passionate affair blossoms that threatens to expose Pete.|In typical Lynch fashion, he makes no effort whatsoever to explain his film or justify its bizarre occurrences, resulting in an enigmatic thriller that feels like the viewer has unknowingly walked into another person's dream. The screenplay adheres to many universal film noir conventions, but Lynch and co-screenwriter Barry Gifford's psychological angle gives them a freedom to do anything that they so desire (a concept they giddily embrace). For fans of surreal, visually arresting cinema, Lynch delivers once again.

	Balthazar Getty
	Bill Pullman
	Gary Busey
	Giovanni Ribisi
	Patricia Arquette
	Richard Pryor
	Robert Blake
	Robert Loggia
	Angelo Badalamenti - Original Music By
	Barry Gifford - Writer
	David Lynch - Director
	David Lynch - Writer
	Mary Sweeney - Editor
	Patricia Norris - Production Designer
	Peter Deming - Cinematographer
	Russell J. Smith - Art Director
	Tom Sternberg, et. al. - Producer

Oddball auteur David Lynch takes viewers on another surreal journey in this highly enigmatic neo-noir. The story concerns a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) who is tormented by his cheating wife (Patricia Arquette), haunted by a spectral demon, and ultimately accused of his wife's brutal slaying, which he doesn't remember. Then "plot two" takes over as the musician switches roles with a mechanic who launches an affair with the seductive moll (Arquette again) of a dangerous gangster. Lynch leaves it up to the audience to connect the dots, which makes for a challenging, though exhilarating, motion picture.

"I like to remember things my own way...How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened."----Fred Madison (Bill Pullman)

Sight and Sound
"...A truly terrifying picture....It works on the evocation of unease through subtle sounds and blaring doom metal..." 09/01/1997 p.48-9

USA Today
"...Titillating....Amusing Lynch trademarks abound..." 02/21/1997 p.4D

Entertainment Weekly
"...Lynch displays his peerless gift for creeping us out with a minimum of means -- the sheer anticipation of horror..." 02/21/1997 p.103-4

New York Times
"...Coolly ominous....[The film] constructs an intricate puzzle out of dream logic, lurid eroticism, violence, shifting identities and fierce intimations of doom..." 02/21/1997 p.C1

Los Angeles Times
"...Beautifully made....LOST HIGHWAY is best at creating a sense of unease....Lynch has put together some thoroughly spooky situations..." 02/21/1997 p.F10

Uncut
3 stars out of 5 -- "[N]ightmare visionary David Lynch slipped the moorings of conventional narrative altogether..." 03/01/2006 p.132

Chicago Sun-Times 6 of 10
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...That's not to say it's without interest. Some of the images are effective, the soundtrack is strong and disturbing, and there is a moment that Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of (although Hitchcock would not have preceded or followed it with this film). Hope is constantly fanned back to life throughout the story; we keep thinking maybe Lynch will somehow pull it off, until the shapeless final scenes, when we realize it really is all an empty stylistic facade. This movie is about design, not cinema...I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It's just that I'd like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air. - Roger Ebert

Variety 7 of 10
"Lost Highway" is a mysterious, ultra-Lynchian exercise in Designer Noir. The cult filmmaker's first feature in more than four years sees him traversing familiar roads involving weird crimes, bizarre sex, sometimes freakish characters, societal unease and fully warranted paranoia with characteristic stylistic panache and daring. Although uneven and too deliberately obscure in meaning to be entirely satisfying, result remains sufficiently intriguing and startling to bring many of Lynch's old fans back on board for this careening ride...The narrative strategies of Lynch and co-screenwriter Barry Gifford, who penned the novel "Wild at Heart" that Lynch adapted for his 1990 feature, combine with key casting decisions to create intentional mysteries for which there are no answers...With the exception of the blustery Loggia, performances tend toward the low-key. Getty's relatively uninflected turn as an unexceptional young man led into deep water by a sexpot (virtually an extension of his brief role in "Natural Born Killers") comes off best, as Pullman and Arquette register in just OK fashion...As usual in Lynch's carefully crafted pictures, all technical contributions, notably the artful lensing of Peter Deming and production design by Patricia Norris, are aces. - Todd McCarthy