spoiler

Rating: 9/10 (12 April 2002)

Probably the best movie of 2001 - which was a pretty amazing year if you frequented the kind of theaters that Muholland played at. Somewhere buried in the first two pages of the IMDB user comments is a detailed explanation of the second half. Put shortly, the deceptively smooth narrative of the first half is a dream. The second half is the waking state, told in a series of lurching flashbacks from the moment that Naomi Watts character wakes up. The events that happen in the narrative present tense are Betty waking, noticing the key and killing herself. The rest of the second half tumbles back and forth in the real world, connect events and names to the first by following a kind of half-awake, dream logic. Most of it coheres once you see that. The first half is a twisted fantasy from an embittered and spent person and the second half is the semi-coherent recollection of the events that triggered her dream.
I thought it was an awfully clever thing to do with a bunch of footage that couldn't find a proper home.
Some people hate or are sick of Lynch's fiction - with its hints of unknowable plots, dramatic sexual passions, dark ladies and so on. I really don't mind it myself. The music, dialogue and images of this movie were clear in my mind for months after I first saw it. Naomi Watts is great in this film.