Every David Lynch Film Ranked From Worst To Best
8. Lost Highway
There's something almost dated and literal about Lost Highway (1997), equipped with the perspective of Lynch's latter work. The first exploration of his favoured theme of dissociative identity, the jail cell transformation of Fred Madison to Pete Dayton is a straight split difficult to reconcile in comparison to the traumatic rabbit hole through which INLAND EMPIRE's Nikki/Sue falls in her descent from reality to a cursed, nightmarish, splintered fiction.
Ironically more dated than his initial silver screen forays, the searingly '90s soundtrack is very much of its time, which proves slightly distracting for a filmmaker otherwise unparalleled in his ability to immerse - trap, even - the audience in a work, irrespective of how surreal or discomforting it is. Despite all that, Lost Highway remains a fascinating and deeply unsettling feature, primarily as a result of Robert Blake's unforgettably powerful Mystery Man. He greets Fred at a party with an incongruous bulging-eye grin, jarring to his sinister cadaver make-up. "As a matter of fact, I'm [at your house] right now," he says, creating a dreadful impossibility with one line of dialogue. It is a scene calibrated to create a sense of wrongness, a sense of alarm, the ineffable creeps - a tone Lynch maintains despite an ironically, relatively straightforward approach to the surreal and the complicated.
Consider Lost Highway an unvarnished demo from a legendary artist as he perfects his approach, boasting one of the best, most inexpungible tracks in a diverse back catalogue.