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David Lynch's "Lost Highway'' is like kissing a mirror: You like what you see, but it's not much fun, and kind of cold. It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I've seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it. To try is to miss the point. What you see is all you get.

That's not to say it's without interest. Some of the images are effective, the soundtrack is strong and disturbing, and there is a moment that Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of (although Hitchcock would not have preceded or followed it with this film). Hope is constantly fanned back to life throughout the story; we keep thinking maybe Lynch will somehow pull it off, until the shapeless final scenes, when we realize it really is all an empty stylistic facade. This movie is about design, not cinema.

It opens with two nervous people living in a cold, threatening house. They hate or fear each other, we sense. "You don't mind if I don't go to the club tonight?'' says the wife ( Patricia Arquette ). She wants to stay home and read. "Read? Read?'' he chuckles bitterly. We cut to a scene that feels inspired by a 1940s 'noir' (" Detour " maybe), showing the husband ( Bill Pullman ) as a crazy hep-cat sax player. Cut back home. Next morning. An envelope is found on their steps. Inside, a videotape of their house (which, architecturally, resembles an old IBM punch card).

More tapes arrive, including one showing the wife's murdered body in bed. They go to a party and meet a disturbing little man with a white clown face ( Robert Blake ), who ingratiatingly tells Pullman, "We met at your house. As a matter of fact, I'm there right now. Call me.'' He does seem to be at both ends of the line. That mirrors another nice touch in the film, which is that Pullman seems able to talk to himself over a doorbell speaker phone.

Can people be in two places at once? Why not? (Warning: plot point coming up.) Halfway through the film, Pullman is arrested for the murder of his wife and locked in solitary confinement. One morning his guard looks in the cell door, and--good God! It's not the same man inside! Now it's a teenager ( Balthazar Getty ). The prison officials can't explain how bodies could be switched in a locked cell, but have no reason to hold the kid. He's released, and gets his old job at the garage.

A gangster ( Robert Loggia ) comes in with his mistress, who is played by Patricia Arquette. Is this the same person as the murdered wife? Was the wife really murdered? Hello? The story now focuses on the relationship between Getty and Loggia, a ruthless but ingratiating man who, in a scene of chilling comic violence, pursues a tailgater and beats him senseless ("Tailgating is one thing I can't tolerate''). Arquette comes to the garage to pick up the kid ("Why don't you take me to dinner?'') and tells him a story of sexual brutality involving Loggia, who is connected to a man who makes porno films. This requires a scene where Arquette is forced to disrobe at gunpoint and stand naked in a roomful of strange men--an echo of Isabella Rossellini's humiliation in Lynch's " Blue Velvet ".      

Does this scene have a point? Does any scene in the movie have a point? "Lost Highway'' plays like a director's idea book, in which isolated scenes and notions are jotted down for possible future use. Instead of massaging them into a finished screenplay, Lynch and collaborator Barry Gifford seem to have filmed the notes.

Is the joke on us? Is it our error to try to make sense of the film, to try to figure out why protagonists change in midstream? Let's say it is. Let's say the movie should be taken exactly as is, with no questions asked. Then what do we have? We still have just the notes for isolated scenes. There's no emotional or artistic thread running through the material to make it seem necessary that it's all in the same film together. The giveaway is that the characters have no interest apart from their situation; they exist entirely as creatures of the movie's design and conceits (except for Loggia's gangster, who has a reality, however fragmentary).

Luis Bunuel , the Spanish surrealist, once made a film in which two actresses played the same role interchangeably, in the appropriately titled " That Obscure Object of Desire " (1977). He made absolutely no attempt to explain this oddity. One woman would leave a room and the other would re-enter. And so on.

But when Lynch has Patricia Arquette apparently playing two women (and Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty perhaps playing the same man), we don't feel it's a surrealistic joke. We feel--I dunno, I guess I felt jerked around. Lynch is such a talented director. Why does he pull the rug out from under his own films? I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It's just that I'd like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Lost Highway (1997)

Rated R Nudity, Violence

135 minutes

Balthazar Getty as Pete Dayton

Bill Pullman as Fred Madison

Robert Blake as Mystery Man

Gary Busey as Bill Dayton

Patricia Arquette as Renee/Alice

Robert Loggia as Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent

Directed by

• David Lynch
• Barry Gifford

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Lost Highway

Anonymous videotapes presage a musician's murder conviction, and a gangster's girlfriend leads a mechanic astray. Anonymous videotapes presage a musician's murder conviction, and a gangster's girlfriend leads a mechanic astray. Anonymous videotapes presage a musician's murder conviction, and a gangster's girlfriend leads a mechanic astray.

• David Lynch
• Barry Gifford
• Bill Pullman
• Patricia Arquette
• John Roselius
• 558 User reviews
• 129 Critic reviews
• 53 Metascore
• 4 wins & 6 nominations

• Fred Madison

• Renee Madison …

• (as Lou Eppolito)

• Mystery Man

• Guard Henry

• Guard Ivory

• Guard Johnny Mack

• Doctor Smordin

• Warden Clements

• Pete Dayton

• Captain Luneau

• Prison Official #1
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia According to co-writer and director David Lynch , the first scene in the film is based on an incident that occurred in his own life. He claims his intercom buzzed early one morning and when he answered it, a voice on the other end that he didn't recognize said, "Dick Laurant is dead." However, by the time he got to the front of the house to look out the window, there was no one outside.
• Goofs When Pete and Sheila are having sex in the car, external shots show the car parked alongside a wall in a dark, tree-covered section of street. Yet in interior shots, the wall is many metres away in the far background and is brightly illuminated.

Ed : Do you own a video camera?

Renee Madison : No. Fred hates them.

Fred Madison : I like to remember things my own way.

Ed : What do you mean by that?

Fred Madison : How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

• Crazy credits A Real Trooper-Guadalupe Hurst
• A breakfast scene with Fred and Renee where Fred asks her where she was when he phoned her from the jazz club the night before, and when she says that she never left the house all evening, his suspicions of her cheating on him intensifies.
• Another scene of a third videotape arriving at Fred and Renee's house where they watch it and catch a glimpse of a cold-faced Fred on one frame. They phone the detectives Al and Lou again who pay them another visit.
• A scene set in the morgue where the attendant, George, prepares an autopsy on Renee's mutilated body where he is joined by a tuxedo-clad medical examiner and the examiner's girlfriend, Joyce, which is immediately followed by a courtroom scene where Fred literally faints after hearing the jury forewoman read the guilty verdict and the judge's sentence of death, which is only heard in the original version.
• A scene in a lingerie shop where two young women, Marian and Raquel, glimpsed only in the porno film at the end, talk about the Renee Madison murder and about the method of execution the state would use when they are interrupted by Andy who gestures for them to hurry up with their selections.
• Another scene follows where Andy, Marian and Raquel are involved in a drugged-out threesome orgy at his house.
• A prison scene where one inmate is shown being led out of his cell to the gas chamber with other prisoners taunting him and the guards preparing for the execution as if it was a formal gathering, plus another scene of Fred talking to the prison guards in the courtyard the next day.
• A full scene of dialogue between the prison warden and Pete Dayton's parents, Candace and Bill, where they are told of their son's whereabouts and his physical condition where he has a hematoma on his forehead and blepharitis, redness around the eyes. Bill and Candace are elusive to the warden's questions about Pete's whereabouts for the last few days. Pete is then brought into the office where he doesn't respond to questions asked, and Bill and Candace are told that they can take him home. After they leave, the warden then makes a statement to reporters outside his office about the disappearance of Fred Madison from the prison.
• Extended scenes of dialogue between Pete and his friends Steve V, Teddy, Carl and Lanie on their arrival at his house where Lanie shows them a scar on her abdomen from an operation she just had. Plus more dialogue as the four of them ride in Steve V's car, where they first arrive at a drive-in restaurant called Johnny's where they pick up Sheila and her two girlfriends and then drive to the bowling alley.
• An extra scene of Pete riding up Van Nuys Boulevard at night on his motorcycle after Alice had phoned him to cancel their evening get-together. Pete arrives at Johnny's Drive-In where he meets with Steve V, Carl and Sheila where Pete responds awkward towards them as he is having a mysterious headache. Pete then savagely beats up two guys who try to pick up Sheila, much to her shock.
• The telephone scene between Pete, Mr. Eddy and the Mystery Man is slightly extended with more dialogue with the Mystery Man telling Pete about him just killing some people and telling him more details about executions in the 'Far East' set to imply China during the Cultural Revolution.
• A brief scene of Fred Madison checking into the Lost Highway Motel and walking towards Room 25 which he knows is right next to Room 26 where Renee and Mr. Eddy are.
• Connections Edited into Zaum - Andare a parare: Apparire/sparire, essere/riessere: il trucco dell'anima e i fuochi d'artificio dell'immortalità (2011)
• Soundtracks I'm Deranged Written by David Bowie and Brian Eno Courtesy of Tintoretto Music (BMI) and Upala Music (BMI) Performed by David Bowie Courtesy of Jones Music and Virgin Records America, Inc.

User reviews 558

• Jun 21, 1999
• How long is Lost Highway? Powered by Alexa
• What is this movie about?
• What parts of the movie are reality and which parts are fantasy?
• What is with the Mystery Man (Robert Blake)?
• January 15, 1997 (France)
• United States
• Official site
• 7035 Senalda Road, Los Angeles, California, USA (Fred Madison's house)
• Asymmetrical Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $15,000,000 (estimated)
• Feb 23, 1997

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 14 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Lost Highway Reviews

It’s a metaphysical mystery that defies literal explanation yet has a weird and haunting emotional and thematic logic to it, like a dream or a nightmare.

Full Review | May 6, 2023

Lynch, always in style, pushes the boundaries of what is unexpected and what really is down the road. Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake, and Balthazar Getty also star in this postmodern noir.

Full Review | Feb 14, 2023

Peels away the pulp trappings and runs almost entirely on film noir’s foundational fears.

Full Review | Nov 5, 2022

Creates a vivid and infernal dreamscape which will drill its way into your psyche.

Full Review | Oct 27, 2022

It travels, without deviating, through the darkest labyrinthine highways of alienation, sex and murder, in which the most unexpected situations of domestic horror are parked on the road as an act of surreal escape. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 25, 2022

Like a warm bath in silty water, it’s enjoyable both because and despite one’s being a mite queasy about just what’s in that murk.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2022

Lynch brings the movie’s febrile and violent artifice to life in visual compositions of a poised, painterly authority and interrupts them with quick bursts of hallucinatory frenzy.

Full Review | Jul 5, 2022

Behind Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, it's probably my favorite David Lynch film.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2022

Justifiably off-putting in its simple but nonetheless jarring narrative disorientation, Lost Highway is hardly the empty, superficial exercise it was written off as.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 24, 2022

It looks fantastic, it has a wildly eclectic cast, and most of all, its pure, unadulterated Lynch.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 4, 2022

Lost Highway, Lynch’s second collaboration with Wild at Heart author Barry Gifford, is all too conscious of doom nipping at your metaphorical heels. It’s a down-and-dirty Los Angeles noir that even James Ellroy would have to look at and say, “damn.”

Full Review | Sep 10, 2021

Senses of unease and menace are soaked into every scene. It is genuinely disturbing in places, adding up to an overall frightening experience that tops close to every horror work of its decade.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 24, 2020

Divided neatly between the electrifying and the tiresome, the movie contains the most breathless work Lynch has produced since Blue Velvet, struggling to break free.

Full Review | Oct 25, 2019

A prototypically baffling David Lynch picture...

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 23, 2019

Beyond subversive and downright ahead of its time.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 21, 2014

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 7, 2011

Strange, disjointed; full of sex and violence.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 2, 2011

Here, the road leads nowhere in particular; what you pay for is the ride.

Full Review | Aug 20, 2009

What Lost Highway lacks in originality--compared to the rest of Lynch's oeuvre--it regains when compared to anyone else's films.

Full Review | Jul 31, 2008

Its demented darkness actually coallesces into a strange kind of giddy joy - not unlike the rush of adrenaline one feels after a brush with danger.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2008

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Lost highway, common sense media reviewers.

Strange, disjointed; full of sex and violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Extremely violent.

Numerous explicitly sexual scenes.

Very strong/abusive language.

Parents need to know that this film is extremely violent and contains numerous explicitly sexual scenes. It's also confusing and disturbing, without any resolution.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this film is extremely violent and contains numerous explicitly sexual scenes. It's also confusing and disturbing, without any resolution. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (6)
• Kids say (5)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Worth it for Loggia

What's the story.

Bill Pullman plays Fred Madison, a jazz musician. He and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) find a series of strange videotapes on their front steps. The police are called and before long Fred is accused of murdering Renee and is sent to prison. There, somehow, he is transformed into another character, Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a young auto mechanic. Pete soon meets a gorgeous woman, also played by Arquette, who seduces him in more ways than one. The cast also includes Robert Loggia (who has a wonderful but violent scene about tailgating) and Robert Blake, who is really, really creepy and mysterious as a really, really creepy and mysterious man (in the credits he's listed as Mystery Man).

Is It Any Good?

The first thirty minutes of LOST HIGHWAY are a David Lynch fan's dream. All his trademarks are there -- the darkness, the atmospheric soundtrack, the rich colors, the exquisitely slow pacing, the long silences, the disturbing mystery. There's no logic to the plot, and no resolution. After the transformation of the main character, it's almost as if reality has become unmoored, and the viewer can either float along with it or try (most likely in vain) to wrench some sense out of it.

Lynch is a brilliant director, and the film has the look and sound that he's made his own. But it's muddled and confusing, and ultimately feels somewhat manipulative -- is the director laughing at us for trying to follow this scrambled story? Is there something there that we're just not smart enough to figure out? Die-hard Lynch fans and film majors may want to check this one out, but for most of us there are much more accessible and enjoyable (while still creepy) ways to experience Lynch's work.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what it all means, which is pretty hard to decipher. Film buffs and Lynch fans might analyze the filmmaker's techniques, particularly the use of sound and color. But this film is hardly family fare, nor does it lend itself to much discussion.

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 25, 2002
• On DVD or streaming : January 25, 2002
• Cast : Bill Pullman , Patricia Arquette , Robert Blake
• Director : David Lynch
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 129 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong language, sexual scenes and extreme violence
• Last updated : March 18, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Lost Highway

"Lost Highway" is a mysterious, ultra-Lynchian exercise in Designer Noir. The cult filmmaker's first feature in more than four years sees him traversing familiar roads involving weird crimes, bizarre sex, sometimes freakish characters, societal unease and fully warranted paranoia with characteristic stylistic panache and daring.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

• Remember Me 14 years ago
• Shutter Island 14 years ago
• Green Zone 14 years ago

“Lost Highway” is a mysterious, ultra-Lynchian exercise in Designer Noir. The cult filmmaker’s first feature in more than four years sees him traversing familiar roads involving weird crimes, bizarre sex, sometimes freakish characters, societal unease and fully warranted paranoia with characteristic stylistic panache and daring. Although uneven and too deliberately obscure in meaning to be entirely satisfying, result remains sufficiently intriguing and startling to bring many of Lynch’s old fans back on board for this careening ride, adding up to decent returns on the specialized circuit and possibly better figures in select overseas markets. Pic debuted in Paris this week in advance of its Sundance unveiling.

A director as reliant upon precise style and tone as Lynch more or less has to hit the bull’s eye to score at all; if his aim is even slightly off the mark, his effects tend to fall flat. Here, there is a notable disparity between the numerous knockout sequences, passages loaded with disquieting moods, sinister intent and sudden eruptions of violence, and scenes of borderline banality. On balance, the former outweigh the latter, and the film does intensify and deepen as it progresses, but there remains a nagging sense of a work not quite completely achieved.

Popular on Variety

Pic starts in high gear with a classic credits sequence of names blasting across the wide screen as the rolling camera hugs the center of the road at night. In a city very much resembling Los Angeles but never specified as such, tenor sax player Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife, Renee ( Patricia Arquette ), see their life destroyed through a deeply disturbing series of events.

Over a period of time that comes perilously close to being boring onscreen, they find ominous videotapes dropped at their door. The first merely shows their house. The second depicts the couple in bed. The third, coming some 40 minutes into the picture, reveals their bedroom as a murder scene. With brutal suddenness, Fred is convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

In his very old-fashioned-looking prison cell, Fred is afflicted by tormented visions. Then, in the film’s great jump into the unexplainable, a young man named Pete (Balthazar Getty) is suddenly occupying Fred’s cell, only to emerge and take up his work as a garage mechanic in the employ of a wheelchair-bound boss, Arnie (Richard Pryor).

Abandoning the initial plot to take off in a new direction, action picks up with Pete doing some jobs for a gangster named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and ill-advisedly taking up with the rich man’s girlfriend, Alice (Arquette, back now as a bleach blonde). A member of the porno underworld with an abundant supply of seedy friends, Alice leads Pete astray in classic femme fatale fashion with inducements to commit crime and deception until an eerie nocturnal confrontation at a cabin on a beach brings the film’s two story strands full circle, after a fashion.

The narrative strategies of Lynch and co-screenwriter Barry Gifford, who penned the novel “Wild at Heart” that Lynch adapted for his 1990 feature, combine with key casting decisions to create intentional mysteries for which there are no answers. When Pullman’s Fred transforms into Getty’s Pete, one is left to ponder whether these are two versions of the same man. And using Arquette in the two principal female roles automatically raises the questions of the fate of the first woman and the identities of both of them.

Beyond these factors, the most alarming element here is an insinuating man who resembles a malevolent clown (Robert Blake). First turning up at a party in the first half, this little creep announces to Fred that, appearances to the contrary, he is actually in Fred’s home at that very moment, and proves it with a phone call to the house that he, the creep, answers. Not surprisingly, the diminutive character materializes again late in the game, to purposely ambiguous , but still skin-crawling, effect.

None of this stuff can be explicated rationally, making this a dream-film that will leave its partisans strenuously attempting to puzzle out its mysteries and non-fans out in the cold. In the Lynch canon, it stands squarely in the middle, not up to the summits represented by “Blue Velvet” or the best of “Twin Peaks” but decidedly superior to “Fire Walk With Me” and “Dune.”

Dramatically, film verges on the lethargic at times, but stylistically there is no mistaking this for the work of any other director. Lynch’s visionary, impressionistic approach to the deep, murky and vile recesses of the psyche and imagination is again boldly on display, as is his talent for putting memorable images on the bigscreen in concert with extraordinary sounds. Lynch’s own audio design has been intricately devised, and the soundtrack, which combines the efforts of longtime Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti and additional composer Barry Adamson with some dynamite contributions by David Bowie and Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, Trent Reznor, Smashing Pumpkins and others, should enjoy a prosperous life of its own on disc.

With the exception of the blustery Loggia, performances tend toward the low-key. Getty’s relatively uninflected turn as an unexceptional young man led into deep water by a sexpot (virtually an extension of his brief role in “Natural Born Killers”) comes off best, as Pullman and Arquette register in just OK fashion.

As usual in Lynch’s carefully crafted pictures, all technical contributions, notably the artful lensing of Peter Deming and production design by Patricia Norris , are aces.

• Production: An October Films release of a Ciby 2000 presentation of a Ciby 2000 /Asymetrical production. Produced by Deepak Nayar, Tom Sternberg, Mary Sweeney. Directed by David Lynch. Screenplay, Lynch, Barry Gifford.
• Crew: Camera (CFI color, Panavision widescreen), Peter Deming; editor, Mary Sweeney; music, Angelo Badalamenti; additional music, Barry Adamson; production design, Patricia Norris; set decoration, Leslie Morales; sound (Dolby digital), Susumu Tokunow; sound design, Lynch; assistant director, Scott Cameron; casting, Johanna Ray, Elaine J. Huzzar. Reviewed at New Line Cinema screening room, L.A., Nov. 20, 1996. (In Sundance, Berlin film festivals.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 135 MIN.
• With: Fred Madison - Bill Pullman Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield - Patricia Arquette Pete Dayton - Balthazar Getty Mystery Man - Robert Blake Sheila - Natasha Gregson Wagner Arnie - Richard Pryor Marian - Lisa Boyle Andy - Michael Massee Phil - Jack Nance Guard Johnny Mack - Jack Kehler Guard Henry - Henry Rollins Warden Clements - Gene Ross Teddy - Scott Coffey Bill Dayton - Gary Busey Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent - Robert Loggia Al - John Roselius Ed - Lou Eppolito

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Lost Highway

• 4K UHD Blu-ray/Blu-ray edition reviewed by Chris Galloway
• October 18 2022

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“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”  A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity,  Lost Highway,  David Lynch’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinematic dreamscapes. Starring Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman, the film expands the horizons of the medium, taking its audience on a journey through the unknown and the unknowable. As this postmodern noir detours into the realm of science fiction, it becomes apparent that the only certainty is uncertainty.

Picture 10/10

The Criterion Collection presents David Lynch’s Lost Highway on 4K UHD in the aspect ratio of 2.39:1 on a triple-layer disc. Presented with Dolby Vision and a 2160p/24hz ultra high-definition encode the new master is sourced from a 4K restoration scanned from the 35mm original A/B negatives. This new set also includes a 1080p high-definition presentation on a standard dual-layer Blu-ray disc that also houses the release’s special features.

The 4K presentation on this disc improves upon Kino’s lackluster Blu-ray edition in all of the same areas that Criterion’s standard Blu-ray presentation does while also stepping things up a notch by cleaning up the very minor issues that are still present on Criterion’s Blu-ray. Like that disc the 4K is nowhere near as murky as Kino's presentation with details looking far stronger if still limited in a few areas due to how the film was originally shot (I’ll touch on that). Dolby Vision and HDR of course help immensely in this area allowing the blacks to come out looking deeper on the whole, with smoother shadows delineation. One shot where Pullman’s character looks down a darkened hallway, as though he's peering into a void, looked especially flat and murky on the Kino disc whereas Criterion’s Blu-ray bettered this shot thanks to improved contrast and range, even if that blackness at the end of the hall still looked a little washed. That same shot as its presented here delivers a void with purer blacks while the shadows along the walls blend far more cleanly into it. The scene looked strong on the new Blu-ray but it's quite striking here.

HDR also helps in the area of highlights with the most notable moment possibly being the bright, blown-out sex scene near the end. The standard Blu-ray also renders this sequence better than Kino’s but HDR helps to really pull out more details in Arquette’s hair and face in this presentation. The scene is also intensely bright to the point where I did catch myself squinting, which feels entirely appropriate. A few lightning strikes and strobing effects are also brighter and cleaner thanks to the wider dynamic range.

Grain comes out looking better here in comparison to the Criterion Blu-ray, despite that presentation already improving upon Kino’s in the same area. I didn’t and won’t fault Criterion's Blu-ray presentation much because it’s still fairly clean and looks fine on a television, at least outside of a couple of scenes that are laced in red light where things can look a little noisy against the blacks. But again, it's all rendered in a more natural manner in 4K and those same “red” scenes don’t feature the same issues that the Blu-ray delivers (HDR/Dolby Vision could also be playing into that).

There are a handful of scenes that can look a little fuzzy or soft around the edges, though this more than likely is a byproduct of the original photography and the filters used. This gets touched on in the features while this article gets a bit more into it, but Lynch had a specific look in mind for the film and “chocolate” filters were used throughout most of filming. These filters ended up causing issues in other areas, including limiting the shadows in places and smudging things a bit, but it sounds like Lynch got the look he wanted with very few blues while boosting the yellows, reds, and browns. Though the colour scheme is ultimately a bit drab because of it the colours that are present still look great with excellent saturation, the reds especially.

In all this is almost certainly the definitive presentation for the film. The restoration has cleaned things up wonderfully while the digital presentation and wider dynamic range help in delivering a cleaner film-like image with richer, deeper shadows and blacks. It really looks marvelous.

[Screen Captures Added: Oct 20th, 2022]

(All SDR screen grabs have been taken from the source disc and have been converted to JPG files. They are presented in full resolution and may not properly fit some monitors. While the screen grabs should offer a general idea of quality they should not be used for reference purposes.)

Audio 10/10

Criterion presents two English audio options: a PCM stereo soundtrack and a DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround soundtrack.  I only listened to the surround presentation.

The notes mention that the soundtrack here is a near-field remaster, which I would assume was done to better optimize the audio presentation for home theater systems. As I’ve noted before I’m not great at picking out differences between audio tracks, and there are times where I know I can delude myself into thinking there is a clear difference between tracks when there isn’t, but I really did find the audio presentation here so much sharper and varied in comparison to the Kino disc.

As with a lot of Lynch’s films audio plays an important role and there is a lot going on in this one. Lynch loves his lower frequencies and there are many low-key rumblings throughout, causing that unease that I assume Lynch is going for yet it’s all still so subtle you barely notice. Range is incredibly wide going from quiet whispers to loud bangs with the greatest of ease, and the audio spreads out naturally to the surrounds, from music to thunderclaps to squealing tires and more. One of the most effective sequences (I thought) was during the scene where Bill Pullman’s character first meets Robert Blake’s Mystery Man, where he’s both talking to him in person and another version of him over the phone at the same time. When the two versions of Blake's character laugh in unison there’s a terrific, unnerving “stereo” effect that adds a delightful little punch to the whole sequence. It all sounds just wonderful and is just one of the small pleasures to be found in this presentation.

Extras 7/10

If any one of Lynch’s films deserves a thorough deep dive into its themes and possible interpretations it’s likely this one, yet that sadly won’t be in the cards since Lynch is hesitant in having such material appear on any releases for his films (Tim Lucas had recorded a commentary for Kino’s previous Blu-ray edition only to have it pulled at Lynch’s insistence). That said, despite the features here being primarily about the film’s production and its director, there are still plenty of hints to be found around what many of the elements in the film represent, or what they possibly mean to Lynch.

Some of this first comes up in this release’s biggest inclusion, a 1997 documentary by Toby Keeler entitled  Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch , running around 80-minutes and found alongside the release’s other features on the standard Blu-ray disc that has been included (no features are found on the 4K disc). Made around the time Lynch was filming  Lost Highway  the documentary does work to a certain degree as a behind-the-scenes making-of, complete with on-set footage, coverage around specific aspects of the production (like the creation of the score) and interviews with members of the cast and crew. Yet it’s ultimately all just part of the documentary's larger framework in covering and exploring Lynch’s work and craft as a whole, venturing all the way back to his early shorts and his first feature,  Eraserhead.  Even his paintings and photography even come up. Through all of this the documentary explores many of the subjects that fascinate and interest the director, and how it all comes back into his work. 14-minutes’ worth of  outtakes  from the documentary are also included and feature a discussion between Lynch and artist Bushnell Keeler, who sounds to have been a sort of mentor to Lynch. Additional footage featuring Jack Fisk (expanding on the story shared by Lynch and Keeler about Lynch first moving out on his own), Peggy Reavey, Barry Gifford, Mel Brooks, and Lynch himself (the director talking about the Log Lady from  Twin Peaks ) is also included.

Also covering the film’s production is a new audio recording of Kristine McKenna and Lynch reading the chapter entitled “Next Door to Dark” from their 2018 book  Room to Dream . How the idea for the film came to Lynch and how he expanded upon it (with writer Gifford) comes up elsewhere but this 40-minute clip manages to probe deeper into what Lynch was trying to create with the film, which sounds to have been a way to explore what it would be like for someone to enter a fugue state (or a “psychogenic fugue state” as he calls it in another interview on this disc) after committing a horrible act, the O.J. Simpson trial being a major influence for Lynch. Various story elements are covered here, most of which sound to have started out as an inkling of an idea, as are details around casting. Lynch pops up 28-minutes in to talk a little about the period before he made  Lost Highway , which included his attempt to make a film called  Dream of the Bovine  that he hoped would star Marlon Brando. He did actually meet with Brando and, despite the actor calling the script “pretentious bullshit,” it sounds as though the two struck up a bit of a friendship and Lynch shares some wonderful stories about the man.

Criterion then creates two new features incorporating archival interview footage:  The Making of  Lost Highway , running about 13-minutes and featuring Lynch and actors Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman and Robert Loggia, along with a separate 11-minutes’ worth of footage from a 1997 interview with  Lynch . Between the two featurettes there’s more about Lynch’s intentions with the film, Lynch explaining how the film represents a mind tricking itself in order to keep living after doing something horrible, and Arquette talks about what fascinated her most about her role, which entailed playing a real person and then a figment of a man’s imagination. Loggia also appears to be having great fun in trying to interpret what’s going on and how his character plays into things (though it’s clear he’s just ecstatic to be there). Interestingly, it also comes out here that the house that appears in the first half of the film was bought for the production and since they owned it Lynch had it repurposed exactly for what he needed.

Sadly, no music video for Nine Inch Nails’  The Perfect Drug  has been included—which I figured would have been a  gimme —but the disc does close with the film’s re-release  trailer  that simply presents a chat window on an iPhone that features images related to the film. It has a real Lynchian vibe and only runs about 50-seconds.

The included booklet then features another excerpt from Chris Rodley’s book  Lynch on Lynch , which Criterion has been referencing through their booklets for all of their releases for Lynch’s films so far (Arrow even included excerpts in the booklet for their release of  Dune ). As expected this excerpt presents Lynch talking about  Lost Highway . Lynch is again surprisingly open about the film, and he’s insistent he wasn’t trying to confound audiences at all but was simply telling the story the only way he felt it could be told. It’s a wonderful read, especially for people coming to the film for the first time and are just not sure what to make of it.

I would have loved some scholarly or academic material obviously  but  the material that Criterion has put together pulls off an admirable job in both covering the film’s production and delving into possible meanings for the film, thanks to Lynch being quite open in talking about what inspired him and how he developed the story. Honestly, there's more here than I was initially expecting.

Criterion's 4K presentation offers the best viewing experience yet for the film.  [Updated with Screen Captures]

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Screen Rant

Lost highway: why it's david lynch's most underrated movie.

From Mulholland Drive to Blue Velvet, many of David Lynch's dark, surreal movies become cult classics. Alas, Lost Highway hasn't earned that status.

Since his debut feature Eraserhead became an overnight sensation on the midnight movie circuit, many of David Lynch’s films have been critically acclaimed instant classics. Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are often included on lists of the greatest movies ever made. His underappreciated hits are usually venerated by receiving positive reviews, like Wild at Heart , or achieved cult classic status, like Dune .

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But Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir Lost Highway was met with mixed reviews from critics and hasn’t become the cult hit it deserves to be. Lost Highway may not be Lynch’s best film, or even close, but it is his most underrated work.

It Has Some Of Lynch’s Most Disturbing Imagery

One of the hallmarks of David Lynch’s style is disturbing imagery, like the alien-like baby featured prominently throughout Eraserhead or the severed ear that opens Blue Velvet .

From the voyeuristic tapes that kick things off to Fred Madison’s trippy dream sequences, Lost Highway has some of the most unsettling images of Lynch’s career.

Bill Pullman Makes For A Compelling Lead

Like a lot of David Lynch’s protagonists — Henry Spencer, Jeffrey Beaumont, Alvin Straight, etc. — Fred Madison is introduced as an everyman. He’s far from an everyman by the end of the movie, though, and Bill Pullman plays this surreal journey brilliantly.

Pullman gives a compelling turn in Lost Highway . He has the chops to convey both the everyman qualities of the character in the movie’s first half and the out-and-out weirdness the story explores in its second half.

The Script Has An Intriguing Self-Reflexive Structure

David Lynch co-wrote the screenplay for Lost Highway with Barry Gifford, whose novel Wild at Heart he’d previously adapted into a delightfully bizarre road movie with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern.

Their script has a self-reflexive structure that’s fascinating. It script acts like a mirror looping story events around, facing characters with the consequences of future actions and informing how those actions come to take place. It means that there are ultimately no definitive conclusions, but it makes for a heck of a ride.

It’s The Closest Lynch Has Come To Making A Straight Noir

The influence of film noir can be seen all over Lynch’s work, from Mulholland Drive ’s parallels with Sunset Boulevard to the ethically questionable protagonist of Blue Velvet . But Lost Highway is the closest Lynch has come to making a full-on noir. A jazz musician being wrongfully accused (or so it seems) of his wife’s murder is a plot ripped straight from an old noir.

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Of course, it has plenty of Lynch’s surrealness layered over it — he transforms into a different person on death row — but it’s pulpier than Lynch’s usual crime stories. With flashy visuals and Bowie on the soundtrack , it’s like a pop-noir.

Patricia Arquette Plays A Unique Kind Of Femme Fatale

Like any great noir, Lost Highway has a captivating femme fatale, played by Patricia Arquette. But her character (or characters) is a femme fatale like no other.

Initially, she’s introduced as Fred Madison’s wife, Renee. She’s murdered and he’s arrested for it. Then, when Fred turns into a mechanic named Pete in his cell, Pete is released and he falls for Alice, also played by Arquette. She begins an affair with him, despite already being the mistress of gangster Mr. Eddy. She’s a quintessential femme fatale — but she’s also, somehow, two people.

The Mystery Man Is One Of Lynch’s Most Surreal Creations

From Killer B.O.B. in Twin Peaks to The Cowboy in Mulholland Drive , David Lynch has graced audiences with a lot of surreal supernatural characters. One of the craziest of the bunch is the Mystery Man from Lost Highway .

After appearing to Fred in a couple of dreams, the Mystery Man approaches him at a party and tells him to call his own house and speak to the guy who’s there. He continues to crop up throughout the movie, and he’s always an eccentric delight.

It Kicked Off Lynch’s L.A. Trilogy

Lost Highway was David Lynch’s first of three consecutive films set in Los Angeles. It was followed by Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire , and they’re collectively considered to be Lynch’s unofficial L.A. trilogy.

As the movie that kicked off this trilogy, Lost Highway gave audiences their first look at Lynch’s unique cinematic vision of Los Angeles before the more famous portrait seen in Mulholland Drive (which focused more on the film industry side of the city ).

The Midpoint Twist Avoids The Usual Second-Act Problems

Most movies suffer from second-act problems because the function of the second act is to find an entertaining way to deliver all the boring stuff that gets the audience from the intriguing setups of the first act to the satisfying payoffs of the third act. Thanks to its baffling midpoint twist, in which the protagonist randomly turns into a whole new person, Lost Highway avoids those problems.

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Just when the second act is starting to drag as most second acts do, Lynch completely changes the game and opens up all kinds of new questions to keep the audience interested.

Robert Loggia Gives An Unforgettable Turn As The Villain

Robert Loggia plays the villain in Lost Highway , a gangster named Mr. Eddy, as well as Dick Laurent, whose death is central to the movie’s many mysteries. Mr. Eddy is a much more fun and cartoonish villain than the disturbing Frank Booth from Blue Velvet .

In scenes like Mr. Eddy’s confrontation with the tailgater, Loggia walks a fine line between the absurdity of the situation and the evil of his character.

The “Dead End” Is Actually Genius

One of the most common criticisms levied at Lost Highway is that its self-reflexive storylines lead the movie to a dead end — but that’s the genius of it.

Watching the nonlinear mayhem of Lost Highway is like going on a rollercoaster. The movie leads the audience in and out of itself.

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‘Lost Highway’ Arrives in Long-Awaited HD [Criterion 4K Review]

He emerges from the faceless crowd of a house party. Robert Blake’s first unveiling as The Mystery Man warps the very world of the film itself. His approach toward the camera dissipates the dance music that has underscored the scene. In an eerie calm, with his tight-lipped smile stuck onto a face pasted with alabaster make-up, he metamorphosizes Lost Highway with the performance of a magic trick.

David Lynch, like any mythic magician, keeps his secrets close to the chest. The filmmaker sculpts in dreams like they are a physical material. Unseen hands made deepest black by material like mental charcoal hold the putty of the synapses. You watch as his films conjure scenarios–pulled from film noir and pulp paperbacks; soap operas and erotic thrillers–and yank them with diegetic force into the stratosphere of the subconscious. Even at his most instinctually abstract, his films never fail to elicit potent reactions amid boisterous swellings of the soul.

The Criterion Collection’s new–and much awaited–HD upgrade of Lynch’s 1997 feature Lost Highway is a gloriously welcome return to a film that has insistently sounded its black sheep’s baa for the past quarter century. A transitional work, lacking the clear exaggeration of film forms and social archetypes that defined Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks , the film instead renders remarkably similar material into a self-described “psychogenic fugue” of relentless darkness. Specifically, the first half of Lost Highway is ensconced in a visual blackness that houses unseen horrors. The deep-shadowed domestic interiors of the central couple’s life are of a mind blind to its own contents. By the time the film twists at the narrowed cross-section of a psychological lemniscate, the unfolding of the narrative has served not as elucidation, but as obfuscation. The deeper Lynch digs, the more elusive explicability becomes.

“Ars gratia artis”, indeed – and what more can you ask for?

Summations of Lynch can come across as charmingly hagiographic, replete with bewitching anecdotes about adopted Woody Woodpecker dolls and collections of dead insects. Contrarily, they too rarely commend his adeptness at harnessing talented actors at their very best. In Lost Highway for example, Robert Loggia is a stunning mixture of the horrific and the enticing, playing what comes across as a manifestation of the same evil force that spawned Blue Velvet ’s Frank Booth and the supernatural antagonist Bob of Twin Peaks . But here Lynch’s life-long penchant for depicting obscure cosmical battles between inexpressible forces of good and evil is flatlined into a tenuous horizon of warbling evil. Lost Highway depicts that evil in conflict not with purity and beauty, but with itself. The tormented doppelgangers and dueling villains of the Rorschachian noir plot eat one another in a dazzling ouroboros. We get caught within, and infected by, their tangled web. 

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Meanwhile Blake, playing a character defined almost exclusively by inscrutability, is nonetheless indelible to an extreme. The micro-adjustments of his uncanny visage are jolting and enrapturing invitations to fruitless scrutiny. Holding the cumbersome and archaic image-making box of the camcorder, he is the ominous focus-puller of the dream machine’s sinewy strings. Like the iconic narrator of The Outer Limits ’s menacing introduction, he controls the vertical and the horizontal.

Admittedly, Lynch’s films do joyously invite over-intellectualization. But any desperation to make linear narrative sense of that which is purposefully and meaningfully lacking such constraints only serves to underplay the pure sensational thrill of his work. The film is like celluloid strips passing through the gate of the projector – or those ominous dashes of yellow road-lines that whizz through us during the film’s bookending credits sequences. Whether we can keep up or not, it rollercoasters into infinity.

Lost Highway has stuck with me for close to two decades, despite my only having seen it once before as a teenager. That is no coincidence. Where it lacks the sheer emotional range present in Lynch’s most eternally rewarding works (among them Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr. , and Eraserhead ) it possesses no shortage of ecstatic compositions, visceral terror, auditorial fascination, or command of the 20th century’s cinematic lexicon. The film is replete with sheer terror, raw and uncomfortable sexuality, rough violence. It careens with a harsh and wrenching flow that feels not unlike seasickness. It roars with a nihilism that embraces meaninglessness like the light at the end of the tunnel. 

In restored glory Lost Highway brims with the indulgent feverishness of unfettered artistic honesty. It has aged incredibly gracefully. However, it remains Lynch’s most difficult-to-pin-down feature film. It defies classification or clarification. When you zig, it zags. But who would have it any other way? 

Lost Highway is available now on 4K UHD+BLU-RAY COMBO and BLU-RAY through Criterion Collection.

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The Ending Of Lost Highway Explained

How exactly does one explain a film like "Lost Highway"? This is David Lynch at his most Lynchian, meaning that it is a work made far more from instinct than logic. In his charmingly odd little book on creativity, " Catching the Big Fish ," Lynch describes his process as just that: "Ideas come in the strangest way if you just pay attention ... So things like this happen and you start dreaming. One thing leads to another, and if you let it, a whole other thing opens up." It is an idiosyncratic and frustratingly non-linear way to approach filmmaking. The result is a blend of surrealism, noir, horror, and middle-American nostalgia that never quite allows the viewer to get comfortable — frequently unsettling, sometimes horrifying, and rarely fully intelligible.

"Lost Highway" is all of the above. After establishing itself very clearly as a slow-burning whodunit, its narrative unexpectedly jumps into one of switched and/or mistaken identities. One protagonist is literally replaced with another one, someone we have never seen before, whose own story and struggles are somehow interwoven with his predecessor.

Considering all this, it would be easy to dismiss "Lost Highway" as nonsense, the ramblings of a director with a keen eye for moody atmospheres who has long been left to his own devices, conventions like plot and coherence be damned. Taste of Cinema included "Lost Highway" on its list of the 30 most confusing movies in cinema history. But to leave it at that sells the film — and its director — quite short. Just because a film is confusing doesn't mean it isn't coherent. Just that it is demanding us to suspend our disbelief a little bit more and open ourselves up to how bizarre real life can be.

Welcome to Los Angeles

First, some context. "Lost Highway" was released in 1997 and is considered the first in David Lynch's unofficial "Los Angeles trilogy," which continues with 2001's " Mulholland Drive " and 2006's "Inland Empire." Though the three movies aren't officially connected, they are all set in and around Los Angeles and examine the same broad themes regarding the divide between art and life and how a city dedicated to creating that divide, that artifice, is able to chew people up and spit them out (via Los Angeles Review of Books ).

Whereas "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire" both center around actresses used and abused by the Hollywood machine, "Lost Highway" starts by introducing us to a male protagonist, Fred Madison ( Bill Pullman ). Fred is a jazz musician — a saxophonist — living with his wife Renee ( Patricia Arquette ) in a large house in the Hollywood Hills. Fred, it is strongly hinted, is suspicious that Renee is having an affair with another man. When we first see him, he receives a strange message over his home's intercom: "Dick Laurent is dead." Who Dick Laurent is, or why we should care, is not discussed. At least not at this moment.

Fred and Renee start receiving disturbing packages in the mail: VHS tapes showing the couple asleep in their own bed. Terrifying. They call the police, but as there is no sign of a break-in at the house, they are unable to help.

'I'm there right now'

At a party, an already-tense Fred meets a freakishly pale man with slicked-back hair who is only referred to in the credits as "Mystery Man" (Robert Blake). Fred has seen him before, in a hallucination that briefly replaces Renee's face with that of the strange man. Without introducing himself, the Mystery Man insists that he and Fred have met before, which Fred doesn't recall. The Mystery Man persists, though, saying that they met at Fred's home. What's more, he states that he is there right now. Handing a confused Fred a cell phone, he tells him to call home. Sure enough, the Mystery Man's voice answers at the other end, claiming that Fred invited him in. Terrified, Fred finds Renee and leaves the party.

The next morning, another videotape arrives. Fred watches it by himself and sees that it is of him, awake in his and Renee's bedroom, standing over her dead body. Renee, as it turns out, is indeed dead. Fred is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death for her murder. Awaiting his sentence on death row, Fred is tormented by visions of the Mystery Man and a cabin in the desert — on fire.

A missing man

Here is where the story's events take a dramatic turn toward the unexpected. In fact, it would be safe to say that it's where we enter an almost entirely different story, connected to that of Fred and Renee by only the thinnest of threads. During a routine cell check, the prison guard discovers that Fred has vanished from his cell. In his place is a young man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty).

Pete is his own man with his own past. He has no idea how he wound up in a prison cell nor who Fred Madison is. But because he is clearly not Fred Madison, the Department of Corrections has no choice but to let him go. He is released into the care of his parents and returns to his job as a mechanic at Arnie's auto garage. Here Pete meets slick gangster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and his girlfriend Alice Wakefield (who is also played by Patricia Arquette). 

The two begin having an affair, during which Alice reveals to Pete that Mr. Eddy is actually an amateur pornography director named (wait for it ... ) Dick Laurent. She is terrified of him and increasingly suspects that he knows about Alice and Pete's affair. They devise a plan to rob Alice's friend Andy (Michael Massee) and skip town. The robbery goes horribly wrong, and Pete ends up accidentally killing Andy. Pete and Alice meet up and flee to an empty cabin in the middle of the desert (the same one that plagued Fred in his dreams). After having sex outside, Alice enters the cabin, leaving Pete, who then turns back into Fred. Fred enters the cabin, but instead of finding Alice or Renee, he encounters the Mystery Man cackling behind a camcorder, chasing Fred.

A final drive

Fred escapes and drives through the desert to the Lost Highway Hotel, where he finds Renee having sex with Dick Laurent. After Renee flees, Fred grabs Laurent and cuts his throat before the Mystery Man shows up with a gun, finishing Laurent off. The man whispers something in Fred's ear before disappearing.

Fred then drives back to his home in the Hollywood Hills, where he buzzes the intercom and speaks into it: "Dick Laurent is dead." Our closing shots are of a shrieking Fred behind the wheel of his car, speeding down the highway in the pitch-black night, police cars in pursuit, as his mind comes apart at the seams.

In interviews, David Lynch said that "Lost Highway" was influenced by the experience of watching the notorious 1994 police chase of O.J. Simpson on the Los Angeles highway (via The A.V. Club ). There is, of course, the obvious similarity: a high-speed chase, a man who allegedly killed his wife. But within that, there is something deeper. In his 2019  PopMatters review of the Kino Lorber Blu-ray of "Lost Highway," Brian Holcomb considers the gap between Simpson's media persona and the version of him we hear screaming in the background of Nicole Brown's 911 call.

"We move through life among strangers whom we try to make less strange by identifying repetitive behaviors as identity," wrote Holcomb. "At some point, we might even say we 'know' a person ... Which is why people feel so betrayed when they discover that someone isn't who they seemed to be. Because how could such a nice person do such a thing? A person we constructed in our minds a certain way. We are shocked because they suddenly revert to the stranger they were before — only worse."

Mistaken identity?

This bisection — between who a person seems to be and the horrible things they are actually capable of — is key to understanding the plot of "Lost Highway." In a winter 1997 interview sourced at LynchNet , Lynch stated that he and co-writer Barry Gifford conceived of Fred's transformation into Pete as a "psychogenic fugue," wherein the sufferer creates an entirely different identity and life for themselves in their mind. This accounts for the transformation and for Fred's reappearance near the film's end. It also fits "Lost Highway" in nicely with the other two films in Lynch's Los Angeles trilogy, both of which feature jumping narratives that provide a view into a protagonist's fractured psyche, along with the revelation of things they wish they hadn't done or were not done to them.

What this doesn't explain, however, is the message over the intercom. It could very well be that Fred, having just killed Dick Laurent, is simply returning to his home to relay the message that he now remembers getting at the film's opening. But this doesn't explain why he received it in the first place. This is why some reviewers have compared the film's plot to a Mobius strip, turning back in on itself to wind up back where it started. It also pulls us further into the slippery and highly subjective concept of identity that "Lost Highway" centers around.

You can't escape the Mystery Man

In an early scene in "Lost Highway," Fred tells the police that he doesn't trust videos because he likes to remember things his way. But in this world — before everyone and their mother was able to edit videos with the flick of a wrist — videos can only tell the truth, no matter what we might think independent of them. In this light, it is highly significant that when Fred encounters the Mystery Man toward the film's end, he is holding a camcorder, giving chase to capture everything Fred is and has done.

The intercom messages may then be a kind of bookend for the beginning of Fred's break with reality and his being pulled back into it. Fred clearly wishes he were someone more like Pete, a James Dean type who effortlessly attracts affairs around him. Try as he might, he is inevitably far closer to someone like Dick Laurent: aging, jealous, constantly betrayed in his own mind. Therefore, when Fred hears that Dick Laurent is dead, he is making a decision from which he can't escape. Not only is Fred about to kill his wife, but he is also, in doing so, about to kill what is essentially an externalized version of himself in favor of being his ideal version of a man. It won't work, though. As he discovers in the film's closing shots, Fred will always be pursued by his own gruesome actions. And, most likely, the cops.

Lost Highway Ending Explained: The Utter Failure Of Masculinity

An interesting piece of trivia: Peter Deming, the cinematographer on David Lynch 's "Lost Highway," shot Lynch's film, " Scream 2 ," and "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" all in the same year. Immediately prior to "Lost Highway," he shot the cockroach comedy "Joe's Apartment." The man is nothing if not diverse. 

"Lost Highway" is an oblique nightmare that swirls haphazardly around themes of identity and sexual insecurity. Its main character — who may be two main characters — is lost in a shadowy noir world of demonic cameramen, underground porn, creepy faceless stalkers, and life-threatening gangsters. Lynch's films are typically surreal and oblique, but can often contain a great deal of humanity and recognizable facets of warmth. One might think of Sailor and Lula from "Wild at Heart," or some of the more subtly funny moments in "Eraserhead" (the delivery of " Okay, Paul! " is a scream). 

"Lost Highway," however, may be Lynch's coldest film. It's filmed largely in inky shadows and sterile, ultra-clean interiors. The natural world is a black hole. The dominant image of "Lost Highway," the one put on the movie's poster, is a forbidding stretch of road rocketing by at an imperceptible speed, surrounded by night. Life is nothing but a constant, blind, hypersonic rush across the alkali flats to oblivion.

The only companion in that nightmare world is regret. Regret, impotence (in both senses of the term), and failure. And the knowledge that your pain and insecurity will not go unnoticed. Life on the lost highway is like Hell. 

It's one of the best films of 1997. 

When Fred Became Pete

"Dick Laurent is dead." So says the mysterious voice into Fred's intercom one morning.

A brief rundown on the story: Fred (Bill Pullman) is a jazz saxophone player whose solos are chaotic and sweaty. He lives with his impeccably beautiful and emotionally distant wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Their lovemaking is unsatisfying, and Fred cannot perform. He is given a condescending pat on the back by his wife who whispers "there, there," compounding his embarrassment on the issue. The couple receives videocassettes, left in envelopes on their doorstep. At first, the tapes are videos of their house's exterior. Later cassettes depict someone sneaking into their home and filming them while they sleep. The final cassette is a film of Fred murdering Renee, and event he has no memory of. Fred is sent to prison. 

In prison, Fred ... transforms. He becomes a younger man named Pete (Balthazar Getty). There is no explanation for the transformation. Pete is logically released from prison and allowed to live his life where he has parents, a girlfriend (Natasha Gregson Wagner), and a job as a mechanic. As a mechanic, Pete attracts the eye of a gangster's moll named Alice who is also played by Patricia Arquette. The gangster, played by Robert Loggia, is an imposing and terrifying presence who beats up a man for tailgating. To be fair to "Lost Highway," the tailgating scene is genuinely funny. 

Why did Fred transform? One could interpret the transformation as a fantastical re-claim of pathetic masculinity. Fred, in being unable to perform sexually, imagined himself as a younger man with a manly job — a mechanic — who immediately draws the attention of a girlfriend as well as an untouchable, dangerous femme fatale. 

Masculinity run afoul

The plot of "Lost Highway" continues into film noir territory, involving Pete in a dark ring of underground porn production, a plot point that doesn't really strike one as shocking. Eventually, Alice and Pete will, in noir fashion, team up to commit crimes. Lives will be taken, and betrayals committed. Pete, after having been sold out and left to be humiliated, transforms back into Fred. As Fred, he returns to his old home and speaks the opening line of dialogue into his intercom. Dick Laurent is dead.

"Lost Highway" appears to be a wish fulfillment fantasy that is run afoul. Fred is concerned about his own masculinity, and his insecurities over his own genitals led him to symbolically "murder" his marriage. The only way out is to transform into a masculine ideal which, for Fred, is a sullen 21-year-old greaser. A greaser who is cool enough to have an ultrasexual girlfriend as well as an ultrasexual mistress. He's not "cool" or "in control." Fred/Pete doesn't long for power or dominance. He only longs for casual, natural acceptance and adoration for being a sullen greaser. 

The problem with Fred's ideal masculine image is that it also must necessarily involve violence. The typical view of machismo is that it carry with it an element of danger and death. A "badass" is — to offer a base definition — merely someone capable at causing harm to others. Living in a manly world will necessitate suffering. Someone will die. Killing will occur. In a manly world of noir fantasy, one will inevitably be betrayed. 

In this way, "Lost Highway" bears a strong resemblance to David Fincher's 1999 film " Fight Club ."

Somebody's watching me, and I got no privacy

Additionally, "Lost Highway" argues that being emasculated is tantamount to being seen. Once cannot remain cool unless they stay mysterious, kind of in the shadows. Throughout "Lost Highway," Fred/Pete find themselves on camera. Either he is on the cassettes at the film's opening, or he is being filmed out in the open by the Mystery Man (Robert Blake). The idea of being recorded every moment of every day is not necessarily a pinion of anxiety in 2022, but in 1997, it was the very height of paranoia. Not to become a dull Freudian, but the Mystery Man, in holding the camera, might symbolize Fred/Pete's superego. Once he finds he is observed, Fred can no longer pretend he is anyone else. He's a sad man who failed his marriage. 

Fred's only choice is to get in the car and drive eternally down the lost highway, the police on his tail. Like a grindhouse Sisyphus, he is eternally condemned to drive away from his fears and insecurities, never resting, never able to let them go. Fred is in Hell. Or perhaps insane. Either way, it's not a good ending for Fred. 

Lynch has been married four times since 1968, with one of his marriages — to longtime collaborator Mary Sweeney — lasting less than a year. "Lost Highway" is a bold and glorious aesthetic exercise — it's easily Lynch's best-looking movie — but also may reveal insecurities the filmmaker had about marriages and the failure thereof. 

The late 1990s were, if movies are to be any indicator, also a time of great reckoning. Old world, post-War American institutions were being examined and torn down in films like "Fight Club," "Pleasantville," and " American Beauty ." "Lost Highway" is Lynch's version of that reckoning.

Lost Highway (1997) - Digipack 4K UHD + Blu-ray Review

“I like to remember things my own way.”

When Fred Madison ( Bill Pullman ), a saxophone player based in Los Angeles, speaks these words to detectives in the beginning of Lost Highway , Lynch, I feel, gives the audience a big clue as to what this neo-noir’s story is about. And for those who’ve experienced Lost Highway and still claim that the film lacks any amount of sense, they obviously weren’t paying attention. But regardless of the whether or not you derive any type of plot from this trippy, dream-like film, the most important thing is, like any other David Lynch film, you know you’re in for an audio/visual experience unlike any other.

With an over-arching eerie quality, the film tells two stories that overlap each other. We start with Fred Madison. Alone in his home, he hears a mysterious voice over the intercom tell him that “Dick Laurent is dead.” He checks outside, but he can find no one there. But the next morning, his wife, the soft-spoken, dark-maned, Renee ( Patricia Arquette ) with whom he has quite a cold and jealous relationship with, finds a VHS placed on their front steps. The tape reveals that someone is watching them, taping them, both outside and inside their house. After one of the tapes reveals quite a frightening piece of footage of Fred, he is quickly arrested and jailed.

In the first thirty minutes alone, Lynch is able to establish Lost Highway to be his darkest and most frightening film he’s ever made. He overwhelms the audience with a dreadful atmosphere that is carried out with pushes of the camera that seem to suck us deeper into an inescapable world and the lingering shots that feel like they last too long. And on top of that, we have the cold and contentious dynamic between Fred and Renee, as well as the creepy (and a bit comical) character of the Mystery Man ( Robert Blake ) who confronts Fred at a party, revealing some unnerving information to Fred.

For the climax of the film, Fred and Pete’s connection is solidified through their doppelganger love interests, but mainly through the Mystery Man who possess some kind of dark magic that is never explained but serves as the culminating factor that brings the film full circle. By the end, as the film somehow comes to mind-boggling (in a good way) conclusion, you are left somehow oddly satisfied with how the film wraps up. I mean, at least I was.

But of course, like with almost any Lynch film, you are left with many questions that can only be answered through your own interpretation. But that is what is great about Lynch ’s films, and especially with this one in particular. Lost Highway is a full immersion into a noir atmosphere that deeply disturbs your core with its graphic and evocative images stemmed from a creepy storyline all told in a way that only David Lynch can. And like I said, if you cannot come up with your own concrete storyline, that’s okay! The film is about the experience of watching it, the feeling you get, and the surreal images that get imprinted in your brain that horrify you but also make it unable to look away. And with the new release, courtesy of Criterion Collection , you can experience Lost Highway in all its weird, dark, glory with a gorgeous new 4K restoration.

DigiPack / 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Home Video Distributor: Criterion Available on Blu-ray - October 11, 2022 Screen Formats: 2.39:1 Subtitles : English SDH Audio: English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1; English: LPCM 2.0 Discs: 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc; Two-disc set Region Encoding: 4K region-free; blu-ray locked to Region A

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, Lost Highway , David Lynch ’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinematic dreamscapes. Starring Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman , the film expands the horizons of the medium, taking its audience on a journey through the unknown and the unknowable. As this postmodern noir detours into the realm of science fiction, it becomes apparent that the only certainty is uncertainty.

Presented in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1 and taken from the original 35 mm A/B camera negative, this restoration that is director approved by Lynch himself is absolutely stunning. As far as definition and clarity go, the restoration is near perfect with not a noticeable scratch to be seen. But the real stars of the restoration are the depth of the dark tones and the color grading that give the more horrific images an extra and surreal pop. I myself, enjoy the potent and extreme color gradings because of their other-worldly quality, and I think it is perfect for this film and this release. And hey, if this is the version that Lynch himself approved, then I would dare say this is the definitive release for all to feast their eyes upon.

There’s nothing like a Lynchian sound design, and my god, does it just absolutely floor you with Criterion’s uncompressed 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. The swelling sound effects, the dialogue, and of course the legendary Angelo Badalamenti ’s atmospheric score all come in clear and strong. Absolutely nothing to complain about here.

Supplements:

Commentary :

Special Features:

Though this release lacks a commentary track, the Blu Ray disc contains such a rich amount of special features that give the most detailed account of David Lynch’s artistic process that we will ever see. From the documentary, to the interviews, to the excerpts of books, both on the disc and in the accompanying essay booklet, the extras are just a beautiful excess into Lynch’s mind.

• Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch , a feature-length 1997 documentary by Toby Keeler featuring Lynch and his collaborators Angelo Badalamenti , Peter Deming , Barry Gifford , Mary Sweeney , and others, along with on-set footage from Lost Highway
• Reading by Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna of excerpts from their 2018 book, Room to Dream
• Archival interviews with Lynch and actors Patricia Arquette , Bill Pullman , and Robert Loggia
• Excerpts from an interview with Lynch from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley ’s book Lynch on Lynch

MPAA Rating: R. Runtime: 134 mins Director : David Lynch Writer: David Lynch; Barry Gifford Cast: Bill Pullman; Patricia Arquette; John Roselius Genre : Mystery | Thriller Tagline: A lost road on the edge of strange... Memorable Movie Quote: "Fucker gets more pussy than a toilet seat." Theatrical Distributor: October Films Official Site: https://www.criterion.com/films/31590-lost-highway Release Date: February, 1997 DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: October 11, 2022 Synopsis : We've met before, haven't we?" A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, Lost Highway, David Lynch's seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker's most potent cinematic dreamscapes. Starring Patricia Arquette and Bill Pullman, the film expands the horizons of the medium, taking its audience on a journey through the unknown and the unknowable. As this postmodern noir detours into the realm of science fiction, it becomes apparent that the only certainty is uncertainty.

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Lost Highway (United States, 1997)

Perhaps it's redundant to say that a David Lynch movie is weird (actually, "incomprehensible" might be a better word). Don't ask me to explain Lost Highway ; I'm not sure I can. For that matter, don't ask Lynch, either. All he's willing to say is that it's "a 21st century noir horror film" and it's up to viewers to draw their own conclusions. Lost Highway is unusually bizarre even for this atypical director. Co-written by Barry Gifford, the film ventures deeper into the nearly psychotic supernatural than any feature Lynch has previous overseen. And, while not approaching the brilliant level attained by Blue Velvet, Lost Highway is an improvement over the film maker's most recent two outings, Wild at Heart (based on the novel by Gifford) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me .

Compelling, creepy, pretentious, self-indulgent, frustrating -- all of these apply to Lost Highway . At times, this film seems like the effort of an exceptionally talented artist. On other occasions, it's more like the product of a hack. Lynch borrows heavily from his own past work without breaking much new ground. Lost Highway 's unevenness is maddening. As for what's going on -- I'm not sure even Lynch knows what it all means. As far as I can tell, Lost Highway is a highly atmospheric horror/thriller that involves spontaneous, uncontrolled time travel, body snatching, and ghostly apparitions. Mostly, it's about the malleability of identity, and, as such, takes a few cues from Hitchcock's Vertigo .

Lost Highway opens by introducing us to Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), an affluent jazz musician with an upscale home and a gorgeous wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). But all is not well in this paradise. Fred and Renee are having trouble communicating and he's suspicious that she's having an affair. One morning, an unmarked videotape is left on the Madisons' doorstep. All it shows is a quick clip of the outside of the house. The next morning, there's another tape. This one is more sinister. Apparently shot from within the bedroom, it shows Fred and Renee peacefully asleep. Shortly thereafter, following a strange, dreamlike episode in which Fred wanders around in a dark nether-dimension, another tape arrives. This one depicts Fred murdering Renee.

Had the story remained fixed on this foundation, Lost Highway might have been a great film. Instead, it wanders off in another direction, so, while the beginning and end are strong, the middle hour, which seemingly has little to do with anything that went before it, is slow and meandering. The lead character for this segment, grungy auto mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) isn't as interesting as Fred. Plus, during this entire extended tangent, we're wondering how (or if) this is going to tie in with the more harrowing material that preceded it.

Questions of identity are central to Lost Highway . Are the male leads, played by different actors, actually the same character? Are the female leads, played by one actress, really different people? And how can one man be in two places at the same time, holding a phone conversation with himself? Of course, if you actually expect answers to any of these questions, you've made a mistake by looking for them in a Lynch film.

Patricia Arquette has developed into an actress with impressive range. She can play the female lead in a sweet romance ( Infinity ), a wacky comedy ( Flirting with Disaster ), or a bloody crime movie ( True Romance ). Here, her performance is modeled after the famous femme fatales of Hollywood's classic noir B-movies (albeit with a few "Lynchian" quirks). She plays two roles in Lost Highway (one blond and one brunette), and, in each of them, she's sexy, sultry, and shows a lot of skin.

Bill Pullman, who normally plays Mr. Nice Guy, is a solid choice for Lost Highway 's most prominent role. Pullman's image works for the character, because we naturally want to like him even if we shouldn't. As Pete, the "second lead", Balthazar Getty ( White Squall ) is significantly weaker. There's nothing interesting about his performance, which gets lost in a sea of more impressive, less prominent turns. Two of the supporting actors are Robert Blake, who is suitably eerie as the Grim Reaper-like Mystery Man, and an over-the-top Robert Loggia, who portrays a tough gangster.

From a technical perspective, Lost Highway demands to be noticed. The juiced-up soundtrack keeps the audience in the movie (one time, a telephone ring was so loud and unexpected that I nearly jumped out of my seat). Some of the camerawork, with its distorted visuals and unconventional angles, seems showy and gratuitous, although there are times (such as the grainy, black-and-white videotape images) when it's effective.

When it comes to rating Lost Highway , the numerical scale seems inadequate. Some viewers will walk out of this film in disgust; others will praise it as a brilliant breath of fresh air. Such is always the polarization over Lynch's work. Personally, I kind of liked Lost Highway , but "liking" a David Lynch movie is much different from "liking" anything else. So, the bottom line is, if you're a Lynch fan or an aficionado of bizarre, offbeat cinema, give Lost Highway a shot. Everyone else will probably best be served by staying away.

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