Check out Mulholland Drive on Episode #8 of the We Watched This Movie Podcast 🎙 

“It'll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else.” 👩🏼‍🤝‍👩🏻

Slip into a lucid trip on this winding, terrifying road high in the Hollywood hills, and leave your grip on reality behind for a magnificent, exasperating 146 minutes that defies conventional explanation, emanating from the mind-bending subconscious of American surrealist and postmodernist polymath, David Lynch. Transforming from a dark, mysterious TV pilot into a fantasia of illusion and identity as a feature film, this unsettling, psychosexual dreamscape forces viewers into the role of movie detectives, frustrating the spectator within us to search for a rational interpretation, and mystifies on a first, third or even fifth watch as 'a love story in the city of dreams', exploring themes of obsession, cinephilia and queer identity. Brilliantly spotlighted throughout are our two female leads in split roles, with a commanding and star-making turn from Naomi Watts as ingénue Betty, and Laura Elena Harring delivers a pitch-perfect performance as the helpless femme fatale Rita, making a mighty twosome that shine in intimate, erotic and most of all human scenes, no matter how strange their mysterious circumstances may appear to be. Bearing the hallmarks of classic Lynchian horror, like macabre imagery, tragic narrative beats and an intense, oestensible quality that disorients and disturbs, the Tinseltown neo-noir is considered one of the best films of the 21st century, inspiring thought-provoking conversation and almost-surgical dissection of its intoxicating sequences, thanks to its famed director's sensory style of filmmaking and visionary storytelling. Frequent Lynch collaborator and cinematographer Peter Deming is in top form capturing the uncanny in every frame, as every shot is carefully composed to drip with foreboding atmopshere and an avant-garde aesthetic, but Angelo Badalamenti's haunting and ominous score is the most memorable work in this masterpiece, acting as an emotional tour guide for delirious audiences while weaving genuine mystery into an already unsettling tale. As someone most eloquently put it, 'a beautiful experience'.

10/10 blue boxes.