A great trip down the darkest corridors of the mind

Rating: 9/10 (22 November 2010)

I don't know how to write a review for this film. It challenges the conventional methods of storytelling. There is no way to tell what it is trying to say. We don't even know where it begins or where it ends. We don't know if it is reality,fiction,fantasy,science fiction, dream or what else. All we know is that it is Lynch film and with Lynch that is all you can be sure of.
Terry Pratchett says how good stories start at different points in the universe but collide at one point and that is where they get interesting. Lynch seems to follow this but at the point they collide something tremendous happens and suddenly everything is upside down.
Mullholland Dr. opens with a surreal dance sequence and then the camera pans to a car accident. We see only one survivor who is now an amnesiac with a bag of money. At this point it can be any normal detective story. It could have been a great film noir. But suddenly all these other things begin to happen.
The movie has its own atmosphere. It is central to the telling of the story. There is brilliant use of lighting and colour. In some scenes you could literally frame them and it would look like a great little surreal painting. The acting is outstanding. Both the leads have very good chemistry and play their roles really well especially Naomi Watts. Also the score makes the movie more surreal, more fascinating, it involves you completely in the plot.
Mullholland Dr. is an extremely fascinating trip into the lives of two women. One an aspiring actress and the other an amnesiac. There is romantic tension and it slowly builds into a very poignant sex scene where Naomi's character keeps repeating that she loves Rita. And after that point things begin to fall apart.
There could be number of interpretations to what happens after wards but that is the beauty of the movie. You can watch it again and again. It is so densely layered and rich in detail that you never get bored. It is tremendously engrossing and a very rich and rewarding movie watching experience.]
For me you could say it is about the fragility of life. Anything can suddenly crack or break and your whole life turns upside down. Like the key and the box are such trivial things but they were opened and something terrible happened.
Or I sometimes think that the box was an outlet to a parallel universe and when it opened everything turned upside down since we descend into it with the camera. Maybe it was like Pandora's box.
Lynch has created one of the best movies of recent times with Mullholland Dr.