Review of Lost Highway (1997) by Devin R — 09 Aug 2008

I'm split over David Lynch's Lost Highway more than Bill Pullman's psyche. On one hand it is a staggeringly effective and stylish creeper of a mystery that gets inside your head and gives you the willies. On the other, it's a basically a more lurid and trashy remix of Lynch's Blue Velvet; where a man's lust and temptation really gets him pulled in over his head into a dangerous world of filth and murder. The major difference between Velvet and Highway is that Highway has a much bleaker, disturbing tone and often feels like an MTV rock video (I could have easily done without the tacked on Marilyn Manson cameo) that prefers to wallow around in the darkness that it's lured into. The violence in Lost Highway often feels as if it's pandering to a crowd of goth-rockers that want sleazy sex and sadistic violence, and I can understand why that is.

This is far from being a masterpiece; it's typical voyeuristic Lynch, with a rather routine story of temptation and lust with the promise of danger; only with just enough bolts intentionally left loose to leave you unable to comprehend it all, because what you can't understand is often more frightening than what you can firmly nail down. Stylistically, it's a great film; oozing with a palpable atmosphere of dread--the best I've experienced since Suspiria, and Patricia Arquette is a femme fatale for the record books. However, Lost Highway isn't insightful, in fact it's rather shallow, and for a such an exercise in psychological style, it's kind of disappointing that, even though it effectively gets inside your head, to discover that there's really not much going on, but--and this is a big BUT--if you are looking for something just a little different, and are just looking for something to give you the creeps, than this is your movie.