Lost Highway

REVIEW
Making the excesses and narrative of Blue Velvet seem the model of restraint by comparison, Lynch's Lost Highway is eerie, scary, enigmatic, weird and provocative. Sometimes the film is all of these at once, when it's in high gear; and sometimes it just tries too hard to evoke just one of those moods, stalling in its tracks. Graced by beautiful cinematography by Peter Deming, Lost Highway is the bizarre, often incomprehensible but nevertheless hypnotic story of a murder, a jazz musician and his wife, a youth in over his head, and the ability to phone someone while standing right next to them without being on the phone. Story coherency is of little consequence in Lost Highway; Lynch and cowriter Barry Gifford go out of their way to give bits of traditional narrative structure and then rub your face in it the very next minute. Blake gives an effectively creepy portrayal.