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…

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…

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…

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…

Lost Highway is my favorite David Lynch film. In high school the film's soundtrack was my life. Despite not finally seeing the film until 2009 from borrowing a buddy's Canadien DVD this film was a part of my whole life.
Lynch's approach to telling this story of duality and memory is not clean. It's not easily divisible into some sort of logic like Mulholland Dr. and that way in which it is told is the most insanely convoluted of Lynch's films (Inland EMpire is just insane and convoluted, bless David Lynch) in a way that it becomes his most easily understood film for this later period yet the least easy to describe. Lynch has spoken to how he likes to…

The first hour of Lost Highway is some of the best stuff David Lynch has ever done: a dark, seductive, dreamy film, which makes incredibly mundane moments deeply frightening and disturbing. Bill Pullman is another great Lynch protagonist, an off-putting and jealous man who sort of radiates a dark menace. Robert Blake is another great Lynch character, a mysterious man of dark intent with a wicked smile. When Balthazar Getty's narrative takes over, however, the film begins to lose much of its momentum. The problem here is that, while the original narrative had a good momentum, the second lacks this. It simply meanders through noir cliches without investing enough interest or mystique in the characters/goings-ons. Had Lost Highway been approached…