Lost Highway Review: David Lynch's Surreal Time Loop is One of the Best Movies of the 1990s

Lost Highway is Directed by David Lynch and Stars Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette

Review: Lost Highway is among David Lynch’s best movies because it’s endlessly beguiling and intriguing despite how undecipherable it is. Maligned upon its initial release in 1997, the movie takes a couple viewing to settle in.

david lynch lost highway movie 1997 review — Lost Highway (1997), directed by David Lynch

Lost Highway Review

Lost Highway is the most underappreciated David Lynch movie, one that served as an introduction to where he’d be heading in the early 2000s on. Because Lost Highway doesn’t make much sense, and the illogical, beguiling snippets and vignettes that take place within the movie are of a similar nature to Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. And while Lost Highway is slightly less operatic than Mulholland Drive (and much less indulgent than Inland Empire), it’s still one of Lynch’s best movies, and one of the best movies of the 1990s, period.

The first half of Lost Highway is centered on professional saxophone player Fred Madison, played by Bill Pullman. Fred is tormented by eerie visions of murder and voyeurism. Strange events keep happening around him, all culminating in a video tape sent to his house that shows the death of his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Once arrested, Fred has an out-of-body experience while on death row that turns Lost Highway on its head.

The rest of the film becomes more and more cryptic, thanks in part to idiosyncratic, often mysterious performances from Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, and Robert Loggia. The trio introduce an underground world to the viewer that partially explains the murder we see take place in the first act. Robert Blake is particularly disturbing and grotesque playing the mysterious man that is able to get inside of the mind of Fred Madison and inexplicably be in multiple places at once.

Lost Highway is among David Lynch‘s best movies because it’s endlessly beguiling and intriguing despite how undecipherable it is. Maligned upon its initial release in 1997, the movie takes a couple viewing to settle in. It has a lo-fi quality similar to how Inland Empire does, with extreme close ups and jagged fish eye shots that are spliced together to keep you uneasy. The movie survives on its bad vibes, which are abundant and powerful.

Lost Highway was recently reissued in 4k by the Criterion Collection so there’s been a reevaluation of the movie within the last year. The 4k restoration is beautifully/harrowingly rendered in great detail. The sound design is revved all the way up, boasting a similarly greasy score underlining characters on the run like Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti accomplished with Wild at Heart.

While it used to feel like a movie lost to the 90s, Lost Highway has had a bit of resurgence. It remains in the top tier of David Lynch movies because it serves as a necessary template for the surrealist filmmaking style that he would develop further and further with his subsequent releases.

Score: 9/10

Genre: Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Watch Lost Highway (1997) on The Criterion Channel and VOD

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