Review of Mulholland Drive (2001) by Andrew H — 23 Apr 2012

Mulholland Drive is incredible. I'm very partial to Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, but this just might be Lynch's best. Dream sequences are very often portrayed on film, but they never really feel like dreams.

Inception is a good example. It portrays the most concrete way of thinking about dreams, without actually creating the right atmosphere. It feels real, then crazy shit happens, you realize you're dreaming, that's it.

I've never had a lucid dream, so I can't honestly say that it wouldn't be like how it's shown in Inception, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't feel like an action movie. Mulholland Drive, on the other hand, creates the feel of dreaming so brilliantly that even thinking about it now feels like thinking about a dream.

I've had dreams (more specifically nightmares) that exist in the same terrifying environment as Mulholland Drive. There's a scene where two people are talking in a restaurant about dreams and they go outside and this face pops out.

That's one of the most startling and scary things I've ever seen. I freeze framed the face that pops out. It's really not that scary, it's not like the girl from the Exorcist, but it felt so real that I had to pause the movie and walk around for half an hour in a state of dread.

It felt like a nightmare. It's weird, and thinking back on it, it shouldn't have been as scary as it was, but that's why it's so brilliant. One of my scariest dreams literally looked like a shitty Atari game.

There were two dimensional zombies in it. It was the context, the fact that at the time it felt real, that made it so scary. Just for that scene alone, the movie should be given some sort of honor or award, but as it goes on it gets even better.

Mulholland Drive makes a fantastic parallel between the version of the word "dream" that means the thoughts and whatnot that go on when you sleep and the version of the word used to describe ambitions or passions or goals.

It's terrifying, clever, brilliant, extremely well acted (Naomi Watts is amazing), and an all around amazing movie that should be considered revolutionary in the way it creates the atmosphere of dreams on film.