With Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart, writer and director David Lynch tried to make us connoisseurs of mystery rather than robots of reason. He continues that mission with Lost Highway. Lynch and co-writer Barry Gifford call this moody work "a 21st century noir horror film."

It revolves around two stories. In the first, a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) suspects his wife (Patricia Arquette) is having an affair. When she is murdered, he is tried and found guilty of the deed. Then this character shapeshifts into a young mechanic (Balthazar Getty) who falls in love with the mistress (Arquette) of a gangster (Robert Loggia). The one character who appears in both stories is a magician (Robert Blake) who knows how to capitalize on the human capacity to believe in only what we can see. This macabre film is punctuated by eerie music by Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins, David Bowie, Lou Reed, and others.

Lost Highway is the kind of movie that makes the ordinary seem extraordinary. And it reveals that many strange things happen to us at night, a time when hallucinations as well as epiphanies can take place. Lynch and company have created a new twilight zone where we can re-imagine what it feels like to be strangers to ourselves, what it means to play multiple roles in our lives, and what sexual politics has done to our cherished ideal of intimacy.


Special DVD features include a 10-part multi-angle interview with director David Lynch.