Fascinating puzzle box of a movie

Rating: 8/10 (10 September 2017)

I enter any David Lynch movie with a mix of anticipation and trepidation. Most of his movies challenge the viewer to make sense of them, but sometimes that challenge is much too steep (Lost Highway, Inland Empire) and sometimes Lynch just seems to be seeing what he can get away with.
But when he gets the mix just right, he creates something that wonderfully balances storytelling and madness. And that's what happens in Mulholland Drive.
The movie starts as a beautiful LA woman escapes from an attempted assassination. She soon finds assistance from a wholesome blonde newly arrived in hopes of becoming a Hollywood star. They start a Nancy Drew- style investigation and occasionally cross paths with a Hollywood director being forced to recast his movie.
At first this seems, in spite of a few really odd moments, as a straightforward mystery, but it's Lynch, so of course, it keeps getting weirder, eventually becoming surreal and disorienting.
The last third of the movie is extremely peculiar, but by the end it's clear that this is David Lynch's version of a Shyamalan film, with all the parts connecting at the end.
Well, more or less. While Shyamalan likes to cross all his "t"s and dot all his "i"s, that is something Lynch hates. He doesn't spoon feed the audience with answers, and even once you figure out what has happened, there are all sorts of oddities and loose ends that can't be fit into the total narrative. In some cases I think it's simply because Lynch is using parts of the original failed TV pilot this is an extension of; how else to explain an early diner scene?
Other directors would have pared most of this away, but Lynch *wants* the messiness and the hanging threads. And much of the fun of Lynch is that you can't make total sense of his stories and are forced to look beyond sense to understand his mysterious world.
As puzzling as Mulholland Drive sometimes is, it ranks as one of the more accessible of his artier films. The movie expects the viewer to put a little work in, but that work will be rewarded.
And if you're still puzzled, seek out the Salon article that attempts to explain it all. But first think about it for a while. Pondering Mulholland Drive is a fun thing to do.