Lost Highway

1997 Directed by David Lynch

A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgangers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.

Bill Pullman Patricia Arquette Balthazar Getty Robert Blake John Roselius Louis Eppolito Jenna Maetlind Michael Massee Henry Rollins Michael Shamus Wiles Mink Stole Leonard Termo Ivory Ocean Jack Kehler David Byrd Gene Ross F. William Parker Guy Siner Alexander Folk Gary Busey Lucy Butler Carl Sundstrom John Solari Jack Al Garrett Heather Stephens Giovanni Ribisi Scott Coffey Natasha Gregson Wagner Show All…

Alternative Titles

妖夜慌踪, Útvesztőben, 로스트 하이웨이, Шоссе в Никуда, Por El Lado Oscuro del Camino

drama mystery thriller

134 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Kenned Lehmann ★★★★ 9

Fred: "I like to remember things my own way"
Cop: "What does that mean?"
Fred: "How i remember them, not necessarily how they happened"
Maybe this explains the whole movie? I dont know.... My brain hurts!
Review by maria ★★★★ 8

i relate to that highway because i, too, am lost
Review by Adam Cook ★★★★ 20

David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a nightmarish noir about jealousy, repressed guilt and murder. As with many of the director’s best films it exists in an unsettling world between reality and a dream where events are not all they seem and a rigid internal logic is forsaken for a descent into the damaged mind of the film’s protagonist. Lost Highway, along with Eraserhead, might be the closest Lynch has ever come to making an out and out horror film. This is a foreboding and ominous work that is as gripping as it is bewildering.
As with much of the director’s work this is a hard film to explain and categorise. It is a film to be experienced first-hand with its…
Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 3

"do you own a video camera?"
"no. fred hates them."
"i like to remember things my own way."
"what do you mean by that?"
"how i remembered them. not necessarily the way they happened."
Review by DirkH ★★★★★ 22

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Part of Dastardly Difficult December: film nr.88
Every work of literary fiction can be analyzed on three basic levels:
- the level of the story/plot
- the level of the reader
- the level of the author
More often than not it doesn't go beyond the first two levels, i.e. what is the story and what is it trying to say, if anything? And what does it mean to me as a reader? What do I take from it?
Only the truly great novels have that third level, the level on which the author either subtly or overtly makes you aware of his presence. This can be done in the guise of an omniscient narrator or more subtle, through language,…
Review by Wes ★★★★ 1

david lynch is the biggest mood honestly because i also have no clue what the fuck is going on at any given moment
Review by nathaxnne ★★★★★ 31

What does the Black Lodge see when it sees us? A labyrinth of doors and exits? Loops and circuits in spacetime fissured and joined, continuous until discontinuous, unidentical at every point yet self-similar? A network to transit, an environment in which to be and to become.
What is noir? Like, what does it do and how does it do it? Noir is about unequal informatics, of landscapes that shift and dissolve based upon their inhabitants and their relative positioning to each other. Noir is the set-up and the execution of the set-up. The set-up necessarily precedes those who enter into it but the set-up is not a set-up until someone wanders in to activate it as such. Noir is a…
Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 8

one of the few films in cinema history
in which there is no division or distinction
between the elements of space and time;
a movie melded within an alternate
spacetime continuum, in which length,
breadth, and depth hold no usefulness
or value & the four faux dimensions fuse into
a nightmare realm of an interminable turnpike.
Review by SilentDawn 12

I wake up. I'm sweating. Lost. Confused. Annoyed. The walls are plastered with red. I hate red. The room is small, or at least I think it is. It's getting tighter the more I observe, crashing in on itself in a claustrophobic fashion. The radio is blaring, showcasing a constant thunder of cool ass tunes that correspond with the lightning storm outside. In spite of all the feverish mayhem, I happened to notice someone. His coat was the same color as the cheap paint, already having loose stitches just like the chipping boundaries of the room. He was standing in the corner. He didn't seem to care about me. He was screaming at the top of his lungs straight into…
Review by Simone ★★★★½ 34

It seems that there are at least two ways to enjoy a David Lynch film. One is to expect it to make sense and do everything you can to analyze the shit out of it until it does. The other is to just revel in the weirdness and the creativity and not worry about making all the pieces fit together.
On my first watch of Lost Highway, I can't possibly put into words what the fuck happened. I feel like there are things I implicitly understood about the narrative and the connection between the two halves of the film, but what I took away from it was a wordless feeling of unease and anxiety. I don't want to think about…
Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

"You'll never have me."
Review by Owen ★★★★½ 8

do you watch David Lynch movies at 1 in the morning as a way to escape your reality by immersing yourself in a seemingly never-ending twisted fantasy world of darkness or are you normal

Recent reviews

Review by SteevSplash

David Lynch lives rent free in my head at every moment of my existence.
Review by robotz

You ever think so hard about a movie that it literally gives you a headache
Review by VicVega74 ★★★★★

Wait what? What a crazy experience. Gonna have dreams, make that nightmares, tonight while my brain tries to figure out what happened. Gotta love Henry Rollins and Marilyn Manson showing up, and what a soundtrack featuring NIN. Now to get back to the mystery....Does Patricia Arquette look better as a blonde or a redhead?
Review by Allen ★★★★★

Imagine this being you first David Lynch movie.
The funniest and scariest David Lynch movie. Definitely his most experimental since Eraserhead, but I enjoy the slower pace of this one makes it more terrifying and disturbing. I love the loss of reason that Lynch constructs with his non linear storytelling. Unlike Mulholland Drive which this movie gets compared to a lot, I don't entirely understand the meaning of Lost Highway like I do Mulholland Drive. I best put it as a Lynchian nightmare that taps into the males lustful desire, misogyny and the Apollonian perception of their dreams. In another terms it's like a wet dream gone wrong, so wrong.
Review by Danny ★★★★

You know what? Maybe David Lynch's style is a style that is for me. When I watched my first Lynch movie I found it very weird and off-putting. But I am now on my 3rd Lynch movie and I love it.
This is yet another highly confusing movie, yet somehow so intelligent at the same time. Everything is meticulously done. You have no idea whats going on but after a rewatch it all makes sense. (at least somewhat lol)
One thing that makes Lost Highway more unique is that its almost entirely up to interpretation. A lot of it actually is not clarified at all like it would be in Mulholland Drive. Its also SUPER close to being a horror…
Review by volatile86 ★★★★½

Really just love this movie. It really is one of Lynch's best.
Review by Tomei Bombadil ★★★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

I'm knocking this movie's rating down a star, even though it is really because of my own fault more so than the movie's. It's probably best to watch this movie before Mulholland Drive, not vice versa (which is what I did), and not just because this is the one that came out first. It is very aesthetically, stylistically, and thematically similar to Mulholland in several ways (i.e. L.A. setting, blurred line between what's real and what's fantasy/dream/nightmare, actors playing two characters who are doppelgangers of each other, etc.) That being said, the movie is, I think, distinct enough from MD that it can be enjoyed and analyzed on its own merits. But because of the similarities I just listed, as…
Review by Kevin Kablasto ★★★★

Lynch's darkest movie? Very little signs of humour in the one, which is typically a trademark of Lynch. Some camera work that he hadn't used before or since which is fantastic in a rewatch. Still a great movie, watched with my gf for her first viewing last night and she was falling asleep during it and then woke up this morning and basically cracked the whole plot wide open. For those that don't understand what this movie is about, apparently you should watch it half asleep!
Review by Wolf-Riot Star

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badonkadonks
Review by Ollie ★★★★

Not peak Lynch for me, but still pretty ace.
90s Patricia Arquette is totally my bag tbh.
Review by Beefcake Supreme Force ★★★½

Fuck tailgaters
Review by Averi E. Weir ★★★★

8 / 10
Lots of narrative roadblocks, even by Lynchian standards, but as with most of his work, the film invites intrigue and dissection. It isn't as emotionally potent as a Blue Velvet or as grotesquely comic as an Eraserhead but its surrealism and anti-plot create something of a meta-noir, ambiguous and cold yet hypnotic and mysterious. As for obvious undercurrents, the usual suspects are here: dark eroticism, possessive masculinity, and runaway romance.