Entertainment

Cult Movies: David Lynch's Lost Highway still a genuine mind-melter

Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway
Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway

Lost Highway

I REMEMBER the sense of bewilderment and bemusement I was left with when I first encountered David Lynch's Lost Highway in 1997 and watching it again today, thanks to a shiny new Blu-ray release from Criterion, I can confirm it remains a genuine mind-melter of a movie.

Not terrible you understand – in fact there's lots to love in there – but a wilfully odd and wildly unhinged affair all the same.

Lynch himself referred to the film at the time as a "21st century noir horror film" but even that rather fanciful description fails to prepare you for the languorous and lysergic onslaught the director unleashes over 134 psychedelically soaked minutes.

In 1997, it perhaps felt like it was trying just a little too hard to shock and freak out audiences. It had been four years since Lynch had delivered his last movie and he possibly viewed this as an overdue opportunity to remind the world of just how weird he could get when in the mood to take a trip. On that front, at least, he succeeds with impressive ease.

Today, oddly enough, Lost Highway feels like fairly standard Lynch fare, offering up as it does the kind of off-beat crime, uneasy slightly freakish characters and twisted sexuality we now associate with his finest work.

Bill Pullman is a moody jazz saxophonist by the name of Fred Madison. While skronking tunelessly away on his horn in a local club, Fred has convinced himself his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) is having an affair. As the awkward, long-held silences between the couple drift on and Fred's world is increasingly dominated by out-of-body experiences and weird dreams, there's a sudden inexplicable murder to deal with that lands Fred on death row and a nasty little nightmare of a man (played with sleazy glee by Robert Blake) who may just be at the very heart of it all.

If that all feels relatively linear, we suddenly find Fred replaced in prison by a young and equally bewildered motor mechanic called Pete Dayton (played by Balthazar Getty) who is swiftly released back into society where he crosses paths with a local crime overlord Mr Eddie (Robert Loggia) and a blonde haired femme fatale played by, wait for it, Patricia Arquette. These two stories then unwind slowly side by side like a pair of intertwined fever dreams.

In many ways, this is David Lynch 101 with a moody Angelo Badalamenti score and minor turns from the likes of Richard Pryor and Marilyn Manson only adding to the offbeat fun.

A slow-moving, trippy excursion into cinematic madness, Lost Highway can now take its place somewhere in the middle of Lynch's own very distinctive canon of work. Not up there with the likes of Blue Velvet or even the best of Twin Peaks, but certainly better than the sorry mess that was Dune, this is a weird and occasionally wonderful peek into prime time Lynch and in all its eccentric and sometimes pretentious glory.

It's still as mad as a box of chemically enhanced frogs, mind you.