Interesting for a viewer who loves solving eye-candy puzzles, without any substantial takeaways

Rating: 7/10 (24 August 2016)

Interesting script and direction. A film about dreams and lives spiraling out of control. Interesting performances. If you like detective films, psychological studies and films like Memento, The Aura (Chile), and Inception this would be in that league of intelligent cinema. But is the film uplifting and a gem, in the league of a Tarkovsky, a Zvyagintsev or a Kieslowski? I think not.
But Lynch does have a sensitive ear for sound/music and an eye for color. But color coding was best done by Kieslowski ("Three colors" trilogy).
I prefer Malick, any day, to Lynch. Malick goes beyond Lynch's clever and sometimes admirable web of associations. within a person's mind. Malick is interested in forces outside the human mind; Lynch is anchored within the human mind with its dreams as the outermost orbit.