Lost Highway

The first 40 minutes of David Lynch’s Lost Highway are among the most masterful of his career, with sustained tension revolving around mysterious videotapes received at the home of a jazz saxophonist (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette). The tapes seem to suggest that Arquette is having an affair, but the circumstances are a whole lot more unnerving than that, especially when Robert Blake appears and makes a phone call to himself at their house. Unfortunately, the film loses focus once Pullman gets arrested for killing Arquette and somehow morphs into Balthazar Getty, a young hood whose life is controlled by vicious gangster Robert Loggia. Lynch would bring abstractions like these together much more effectively in Mulholland Dr., but Lost Highway is still an intriguing warm-up.

Updated 05/24/2010