Lost Highway
1997 · Directed by David Lynch
Original language: English
- drama
- thriller
- mystery
The story
A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgängers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.
What it’s like
Smeared darkness broken by hard, sourceless light: a saxophonist's black-walled house rendered in deep shadow, interrupted by bursts of white glare and the slow red throb of a neon sign. Lynch's framing is static and unhurried, with long holds on empty rooms, ceiling fans turning, and faces pressed close to the lens until they go waxy and unreadable. The palette is mostly black, oxblood and sickly fluorescent green, while the sound is a restless industrial hum under a noir jazz score that keeps cutting to Angelo Badalamenti's pulsing, dreamlike ambience and sudden, shocking silences. The sensation is dread-soaked and slippery, a late-night nightmare that refuses to resolve, best watched alone with the lights off. Its emotional register is jealousy, sexual unease and dissociation, and its central figure is a fractured, paranoid man drifting out of his own life. Violence is sudden and brutal, including a graphic murder and sexual content that is explicit and uncomfortable, with fear and cruelty pervading throughout. It suits viewers who want surreal, unsettling cinema that rewards patience and rejects comfort.
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