In a BBC Culture poll of critics back in 2016, David Lynch's film was voted the greatest film of the 21st century, incredibly beating the likes of Pan's Labyrinth, Zodiac and The Grand Budapest Hotel. (For the record, Jason Statham's Death Race remake didn't even place.) That's the level at which it's revered: it's the most highly rated of Lynch's feature films on the IMDb, a co-winner for Best Director at Cannes, Oscar-nominated for Best Director... Granted that a lot of awards have been won over the years by absolute tat, is it really that much of a masterpiece?
Just as Sunset Boulevard is actually Sunset Blvd., so Mulholland Drive is actually Mulholland Dr., as seen on a road sign under Angelo Badalamenti's sinister, typically Lynchian title music while a black limousine twists through the Hollywood Hills. It's involved in a spectacular accident leaving only one survivor: an amnesiac (Laura Ellen Harring) who takes the name Rita off an old poster for Gilda and holes up in an empty apartment. The new tenant, newly-arrived aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) turns up and the two women try and work out who she really is.... Well, that may be how it starts, but at some point reality breaks down completely, with most of the events of the previous two hours completely abandoned and Watts and Harring playing entirely different people. Or are they? What really happened? How much of it is fantasy, hallucination, dreamscape?
Even the people who love it don't claim to fully understand it (that's one of the reasons they love it) and it's apparently one of those movies you have to rewatch numerous times to get to grips with. I've never been a fan of obscurity for its own sake, and the apparent lack of resolution annoyed me when I first saw the film (in Denver, Colorado) and to be honest it still annoys me. But this is a David Lynch film so there are any number of agreeably weird byways to explore: a pair of creepy mobster types (Dan Hedaya and composer Angelo Badalamenti) apparently under orders from a silent, wheelchair-bound man in an windowless room, a cuckolded film director (Justin Theroux) forced to cast an actress he doesn't want, a psychic who turns up, claims "someone is in trouble" and is never seen again, and more memorably the nightclub in which Rebekah Del Rio performs an a capella version of Roy Orbison's Crying in Spanish. More memorable still is a stunning scene in Winkie's Diner concerning a dream of some unspeakable, primal evil hiding in a back alley behind the building, and it's as unsettling and freaky-creepy as anything.
Any number of those elements may or may not have recurred in the TV series for which this was originally the pilot episode, until ABC turned it down and it mutated into a feature film. That may also be why there's hardly any strong language because of network standards (and presumably it was the extra material that involved the nudity). But these strange characters and odd little moments - including a hilariously botched murder in a private eye's office - are frustratingly never allowed to develop as everything that has apparently been set up is ignored, forgotten or switched around.
For hardcore Lynch fans it's a no-brainer. But personally I'm still not convinced as to either Mulholland Dr.'s cult appeal or its alleged masterpiece stature; I did enjoy it more as a rewatch, and there's enough actual narrative in there to get to grips with (unlike Inland Empire, which I absolutely hated), but it's no Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, for me Lynch's best film by a mile. But's it's ultimately too frustrating and too wilfully obscure, even with a handy explanation in one of the BluRay's extras, and there's not enough reward for working out exactly what the hell is going on.
**
(This is an edited version of a review originally written for FrightFest's Gore In The Store section.)
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