Film

Mulholland Drive

Director
David Lynch
Certificate
15
Running Time
147 mins

Anyone worried about David Lynch‘s apparent loss of weirdness after The Straight Story will have been delighted to find that Mulholland Drive pitched the director firmly back in Twin Peaks/Lost Highway territory with a murky meditation on identity, murder and the movie industry whose pea-souper of a plot remains infuriatingly elusive. Escaping from a car crash in which the two men about to murder her are themselves killed, amnesia-stricken Laura Elena Harring staggers to safety, eventually holing up in an apartment complex where she’s discovered by aspiring actress Naomi Watts. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated storyline, young film director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is having a bad day in Hollywood . . .

This being a David Lynch movie, of course, the more you know, the less you understand. There are dual identities and that decidedly non-linear structure to deal with, along with all the usual trademarks: sinister four-foot-nothing blokes, surreal cabaret singers, red velvet curtain backdrops and, this time around, a baffling blue box that seems to mark the divide between reality and fantasy. It’s back on screen in the Everyman’s Saturday late night season of cult classics.

 

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By robin askew, Saturday, Mar 18 2017

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