All 10 David Lynch Movies Ranked By Weirdness

10. The Straight Story

The title says it all.

Most Lynch movies feel like anything but a straight story. The narratives of Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Inland Empire are all draped across brain-melting temporal structures. Even the movies that follow a simple start-middle-end structure are so full of strange characters behaving strangely in strange settings that it’s enough to make most fairweather viewers abandon all hope.

But biopic road drama The Straight Story is a striking departure from Lynch’s token oddness. The story couldn’t get more straightforward. An elderly man (Richard Farnswrorth) travels across Mid West America on a lawnmower to visit his ailing brother. And he does so. The story is straightforward, our protagonist literally travels in a straight line, and his name is Alvin Straight.

For anyone who called Lynch’s work too confusing, this is quite the response.

Released by Walt Disney, this is Lynch at his least Lynchian, telling a story without violence or sex or anything seedy. It’s leisurely, heartwarming, and full of sentiment towards both its protagonist and the glorious midwestern landscapes.

Weirdest Bit: The woman who gives a distraught monologue on how she cannot avoid running over deer in her car. It’s a wonderfully Lynchian moment of straight-laced suburbia unravelling in the face of the unexplainable macabre.