All 10 David Lynch Movies Ranked By Weirdness

Lynch’s most critically acclaimed work since the 80’s is a tale of two realities: glitzy Hollywood fantasy, and grisly Hollywood reality.

What makes Mulholland Drive such a tough nut to crack on first viewing is its narrative structure. The first hour and half is a dreamy Hollywood mystery about an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) and her amnesiac A-list companion (Laura Harring). Then the camera dives inside a blue box and the entire movie changes.

An alternate version of the world unfolds - a painful story of jealousy and spurned lovers - wherein our heroine (Watts) has now put out a hit on her ex-lover (Harring), and their names have entirely changed.

Long story short - the first half of the movie is a pre-suicide fantasy of Watts’ character, with the second half the reality that leads up to that moment and her tragic end. But you’d be hard-pressed to suss that out on first viewing, the dreamlike form of the movie serving to deliberately confound. On top of that we have a cavalcade of Lynchian tropes to confound further: otherworldly angels (the Cowboy) and demons (the Bum), mobsters, hitmen, strange nightclubs, and a not-so-sweet old couple.

Weirdest Bit: The sequence in Winkies is an absolute classic slice of nightmare cinema, but it’s tough to find a weirder moment than the harrowing climax where the Bum sets the cackling old couple loose to terrorise Watts.