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…

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…

I am convinced that Lynch conceived of 'Lost Highway' as a ploy to get Partricia Arquette naked. He certainly succeeds, it's hard to keep track of the amount of times her birthday suit is deployed throughout the films runtime. Yet another middle-child of Lynch's eclectic filmography (sandwiched somewhere inbetween 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me' and 'Mulholland Drive'), 'Lost Highway' is perhaps just as unapologetic in the nakedness of its ambition. Nudity is never superfluous in Lynch's work, and in fact suits this film rather well, given the significance of pornography to its 'plot' (whatever that word means). I didn't understand this film, though I can't fault myself for trying, and unlike 'Mulholland Drive' or 'Twin Peaks', my ignorance no…