Review of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) by Karin H — 11 Feb 2010

Prequels are the least necessary of films. The need to understand back story serves no function normally than to make explicit that which should remain implicit. What better person to raise this moribund concept than a filmmaker who is the most elliptical you could imagine? Fire Walk With Me does not explain what happened before the Twin Peaks TV series. It alludes to those events, and transcends them.

This is very different to the television series - neither better nor worse, but different. With the shackles of the television format released, Lynch is free to lift more of the underbelly of Twin Peaks for us to experience. The results are unnerving, deeply unsettling and riveting. This is not Laura Palmer, the prom queen. This is the sexually abused, promiscuous, cocaine-addicted Laura Palmer.

This is not an enjoyable film, but it is an unforgettable one. There are sequences that will haunt you, and stay in your mind for some time. A sequence set in The Bang Bang Bar combines rhythmic music with strobe lighting, obscure dialogue with swaying bodies, to create a heady hallucenogenic cocktail. It is one of the best sequences Lynch has committed to celluloid.

There are mis-steps. The scenes with the FBI agents simply do not work. As these are at the start of the film, there is an immediate obstacle to the film working. Some of the characters in the TV series show up in one scene only - as if to spark the memory and pay lip service - but do not add to the story.

All in all, a unique cinematic experience.