Fire Walk with Me Review: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Prequel is Among the Saddest Movies Ever Made

   September 25, 2024
fire walk with me movie
Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in Fire Walk with Me (1992), directed by David Lynch

Score: 9/10

A sense of dread and despair blankets the entirety of Fire Walk with Me, the Twin Peaks prequel movie centered on the torment and inevitable death of Homecoming queen Laura Palmer in the fictional small town in Washington. There’s little fun to be had as much of the movie descends into a few frightening subplots with characters hiding dark secrets.

And many of these characters in Fire Walk with Me are from the original Twin Peaks series. Among them are Laura’s classmates Donna (Moira Kelly), Bobby (Dana Ashbrook) and James (James Marshall), as well as the long line of adults that were frequently featured in the Twin Peaks show, most notably Laura’s agonizing and possessed father Leland (Ray Wise).

Fire Walk with Me is perhaps the darkest and eeriest David Lynch has ever gone, and certainly the bleakest in the Twin Peaks universe. The further and further he pulls back the curtains of Laura’s final days, the more the film becomes harder to watch. Sheryl Lee was originally (and unrightfully) criticized because of her casting and performance as Laura Palmer (and Laura’s cousin Maddy), but she’s simultaneously mesmerizing and heartbreaking in the lead role. She conveys pure terror effortlessly throughout Fire Walk with Me, a feeling that bleeds through the screen in nearly every shot.

It might go without saying, but Fire Walk with Me is best to watch having already seen the original two seasons of the hit television series despite the movie being a prequel. Having prior knowledge of each supporting character’s relationship to Laura ultimately makes many of the smallest interactions speak the loudest. The little details connect in ways I couldn’t have imagined, making Fire Walk with Me not only a worthy addition to the Twin Peaks universe, but also a necessity.

And also a necessity to the film canon because many filmmakers have tried to achieve what David Lynch does in Fire Walk with Me. There’s a long lineage of movies centered on the doomed female protagonist almost meant to meet a tragic end. Just these last few years, Andrew Dominik and Sam Taylor-Johnson tried their own versions of the Laura Palmer narrative with Blonde and Back to Black, respectively. The biggest difference is that those are biopics and that Laura Palmer’s story is fictional.

There’s an aura of showiness and authorship that circles above those two biopics (and many like them) that makes it hard to both empathize with the movies themselves and take their stories at face value and in their truest forms from their directors. Lynch doesn’t have to worry about this because the Laura Palmer story (and the Twin Peaks universe) is completely fictionalized. Lynch is the author of this story, unlike a movie like Blonde where Dominik rips the saddest moments from another human’s real life and sleazily displays it for the world.

Fire Walk with Me is an astounding achievement, one that deepens the lore of Twin Peaks without ever feeling like a cash-grab opportunity the same way many film prequels and sequels do nowadays. But Lynch’s 1992 movie has something to say and a very distinct way to say it. It is intense and violent, and ultimately one of the saddest movies ever made.

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