"Lost Highway" may be Lynch's best and most Lynchian film yet. Dark and disturbing, unrelenting and unsettling, gorgeously made, sizzingly sensual yet coldly fatalist, it shows Lynch to be even more determined to escape the shackles of narrative convention, even after four years of being unable to get his projects financed. In its fever-dream orchestration of incident, sound and music, Lynch has made a musical- one that after you've seen, you find yourself humming- in your sleep. In interviews, Lynch is notoriously elusive, wanting never to pin down meaning, symbolism or directorial intent, but he is fond of saying things much like his characters would, such as that he's "lost in darkness and confusion." Whatever his working methods, the result is a film I've managed to sit through four times now, and it's been more haunting each time.....
Whether taken as fantasy or nightmare, Lynch's revisionist noir yarn is as pungent as a punch in the face, as quixotic as revisiting a lost love; it's essentially a romantic tragedy, tinged with a deep undercurrent of sadness and hurt...
And yet is the story banal, riddled with psychological cliches, or grandly mysterious? I lean toward the latter: (Ray Pride)
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