Near masterpiece that degenerates into an incoherent mess

Rating: 5/10 (29 December 2006)

The first two-thirds of this film feature some of the best directing David Lynch has ever done. Aspiring starlet Naomi Watts arrives in Hollywood to stay in her aunt's apartment and discovers amnesiac Lara Elena Harring taking refuge there. In between auditions, Watts assists Harring in getting to the bottom of the accident that left her with amnesia and the identity of the shadowy people pursuing her. Various other subplots encircle the central thread including a perky landlady, a cuckolded director and a police investigation. The film is alternately surreal, darkly humorous and creepy. Watts, in particular, is magnificent in a breakthrough role as the inquisitive starlet. She is incredibly appealing, gutsy and sexy. Unfortunately, the latter third of the film collapses in on itself into an incoherent and ludicrous jumble of death, lesbianism, logic loopholes and loose ends, with Lynch repeating many of the same plot contrivances that he perpetrated in the equally incoherent Lost Highways. It is rare to see such a promising and deftly rendered production take such an immediate and sharp downward spiral. Part of the problem could conceivably be that the film was initially intended as the pilot for a TV series that was not picked up. Lynch then tacked on a crummy non-conclusion filled with gratuitous sex, nudity and violence, which fails to answer any of the mysteries presented in the early passages and nicely sabotages the fine performances.