An extremely interesting, intelligent, imaginative and absorbing psychological mystery thriller

Rating: 10/10 (13 August 2010)

"Mulholland Drive", 2001. Written and Directed by: David Lynch. * * * *
This is one of the most expertly directed, imaginative and fascinating psychological mystery drama films I've ever seen. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I really admire this film. I consider it a masterpiece.
Made in Lynch's signature dreamlike, dark, weird and complicated storytelling style, involving changed and uncertain identities and character relationships. As a bonus, Lynch manages to skillfully add and execute a scene of dark humor into the story. It's a film to pay close attention to, with clues presented from beginning to end.
"Mulholland Drive" is similar to the weird "Lost Highway", 1997, which most critics dismissed as mediocre. Both have strange and complicated characters and stories. Personally, I liked "Lost Highway", but admit it's shortcomings. It's all style and not much else. "Mulholland Drive" is superior mainly for it's superior direction. For it's genre, it's more engaging and convincing.
Clearly, Lynch has mastered his unusual and very unique storytelling style and technique with this film. Lynch's ability to set up scenes of troubled characters in strange circumstances and the acting performance he gets out of them is especially impressive. Naomi Watts and Laura Harring both give very good acting performances, making memorable impressions for the film year of 2001. Another impressive, haunting and hypnotic music score from Angelo Badalamenti.
The story of "Mulholland Drive" is set in present day Los Angeles and concerns a young woman who suffers from memory loss after a car accident. She befriends a hopeful and optimistic woman newly arrived and seeking acting auditions in Hollywood. This is not quite the truth. The real story is very different. The film is very non-linear and thematic. Very much a thinking person's kind of film. Part real life, part fantasy, part dream and part hallucination. "Mulholland Drive" is all of these things. There's a lot of different layers, elements, ideas, characters and themes in the film and it all doesn't come completely together until the chilling sequence of the final minutes of the film. This scene really threw me off a lot, the first time I saw it. That's just Lynch's style. To mystify and hypnotize the audience all the way through and then through in a radical, bizarre twist at the end. I consider myself of above average intelligence and to be highly visually attentive. It took me several viewings of the film to better understand exactly what happened in the story and the meaning and relationship of all these different characters to the two lead characters (Watts and Harring).
Nominated for a Best Director Academy Award, nominated for The Golden Palm at Cannes and winner of the Best Director award at Cannes. This film deserved more Academy Award nominations than it received, only Best Director. My guess is the film is simply too weird for Hollywood to fully acknowledge. At least Hollywood gave Lynch a Best Director nomination. Screenplay, cinematography, sound, music score and the lead acting performances of Watts and Harring are all excellent, yet the film received no nominations at all, in these very obvious and deserving categories. Overall, the film looks great. It's hard to believe the budget for this film was only $7 million dollars, far below the typical budget of a Hollywood film of 2001.
A must see for any discerning, serious film buff.