Every David Lynch Film Ranked From Worst To Best
9. Wild At Heart
Where Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was savaged critically, Wild At Heart (1990) was adored in influential circles, as evidenced by its Palme d'Or award from the Cannes Film Festival. Reception to the two films, released within two years of one another, has vacillated in the decades since. Where Fire Walk With Me enjoys a posthumous reputation - that is no exaggeration; the film and by extension the property was murdered - there is something troubling about Wild At Heart in retrospect, a film made before Lynch settled back into his genius, surrealistic groove.
This road movie, an à la mode early decade genre, influenced Quentin Tarantino's early work (which may explain his dismissal of Fire Walk With Me). In itself and especially in comparison also to the equally-aged Natural Born Killers, Wild At Heart struggles to reconcile any message with its glorified brutality. The opening scene sees Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage) bludgeon the brain of the assassin hired by the disapproving mother of his beau Lula (Laura Dern) in an ultra-violent overkill sequence glamorised by a crunching rock track, framed after the fact as a dubious gag through the resumption of the preceding swing number. Still, Willem Defoe's Bobby Peru is a disgustingly brilliant Lynchian villain, tellingly as delighted by bloodshed as he is rudimentary word play, with Lynch associating a stunted, narrow mind with all the world's ills.
Moreover, long-time collaborator Grace Zabriskie makes a disturbing impression in an uncanny scene boasting slowdown sound design and inscrutable dialogue, in a foreshadowing of his undiluted latter work.