I had a dream about this place.

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2008)

Mulholland Drive is, in real life, a very long and meandering, twisting road in California. Mulholland Drive, the film, is a very long and meandering, twisted movie, which has a short but pivotal scene which takes place on the infamous road.
A naive girl comes from Canada to stay at her aunt's apartment (hint: where is her aunt? where did she go, and why is she not at her own apartment?) and when she gets there, she finds a brunette in the shower, with complete amnesia, she can't remember anything- except that she was in an accident while going somewhere on Mulholland Drive. She and the mystery girl try to find out who she is and what exactly happened on Mulholland Drive. And where did the mystery girl get the thousands of dollars in cash in her purse? Why are these two guys trying to kill her? And what the hell does this little blue key fit?
Along the way, we see two men have a bizarre experience (which is both genuinely creepy and intentionally funny) at a diner called Winkie's. A rather amusingly inept hit-man also figures into things somehow. And a film director named Adam Kesher is being threatened with death unless he casts a certain specific (unknown) actress in the lead of a new movie he's working on. As the Canadian and the amnesiac delve deeper into searching for her identity, the amnesiac starts to mirror the up-and-coming Canadian actress, even dying her hair blonde and cutting it like hers. They have another odd experience at a performance club called Silencio, when it starts to make sense, TO THEM. You, the viewer are still lost in space. But then, two thirds of the way into the movie, just when it starts to make sense to the characters, Lynch pulls the rug out from underneath his audience.
In the last third of the film, we see the same actors playing different characters, as the plot lapses into a series of flashbacks, giving us the recent histories on the new characters we've been introduced to, via flashbacks.
It is an absolutely brilliant, twisted nightmare, beautifully photographed on the streets of Hollywood and LA, with great acting by all involved. The kind of movie whose meaning is not readily apparent, and is all the more better for it. Watch Mulholland Drive once, IN ITS ENTIRETY, the have a look around the websites at the various different clues and theories about the film's plot and then watch it again. And again. And again.
Long but not overlong, it's one of the very rare times when a movie actually seems to get better the more times it is watched, and only then can the viewer start to appreciate its many layered meaning and vague references.