Good concept, poorly executed.

Excellent but underrated film

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Lost Highway is another Lynch film that captures the blurred line between dreams and reality. There's something about the way David Lynch's mind works that allows him to completely control the grey area that stands between normal feelings and insurmountable fear or discomfort. A lot of times he does so with the aid of using dream-like elements for the narrative. In the case of Lost Highway, the dream is really more of a nightmare, as the themes explored in this "story" can be pretty dark or just overall pretty scary. Yes, Lost Highway is definitely a horror, and an effective one at that, at least to me.Whenever I try to recount the main events of the film's plot, I really can't make out a singular cohesive story. I can read analyses for this movie and probably figure out the baseline narrative but while watching the movie, I really did feel like I was subjected to a series of anthology scenes or something. In other words, a good portion of Lost Highway is just a bunch of surrealistic events happening one after another. This is not to say that Lynch dropped the ball on storytelling for this one though. I actually think, by going for such a fragmented and irregular plot structure, he creates an even more interesting story, as he always does. For Mulholland Drive, I talked about how we're presented different parts of the narrative that eventually flips. It's not very different in Lost Highway except that the pieces of the narrative that we're given are even more of a mystery, which makes the film so good and almost satisfying. David Lynch seems to constantly play with our expectations and feelings about what is supposed to, or could happen throughout the movie.I also really love David Lynch's brand of horror. Somehow he's able to mix ambient music with artsy, still camera shots (upon given context) to create extremely unsettling scenes. The mere fact that there isn't a solid story to fall back on (while watching Lost Highway) after an intense scene can be scary in itself because the audience's expectations for what happens next could just go off the rails.

I study cinematography, i just couldn't watch the movie till the end, the light and the scene is so badly lit i think an amateur directed the cinematography in this movie. Nevertheless i donț judge a book by its cover, if the story is good i can handle the fact that the director of photography was terrible at his job, but the story wasn't good, it was awful, its just a mix up of twisted boring unrelated events, nothing connects to nothing, there is no sense to the movie..waste of budget and production time.

There, that title alone is enough to get fans to cringe and generate torrents of seething hatred now. This film is a Lynch film, it is therefor a mystery/crime with a very strong emphasis on the mystery...and the crime. But in both cases, an extreme version. So extreme in fact is the mystery, that it never actually unravels its coherent meaning, for simply, there is none. This sounds all very seductive to the pseudo-intellectual, but for others this comes across as clearly lacking a coherence even within the incoherence, an order in the chaos attempted. This comes across as way, way too many sex scenes, unnecessary violence to cover up strong plot work, easily too much length, and ultimately an artist abusing his status in creating lazy and complacent pudding: it's sweet, it looks good, but it's amorphic. Shape cannot entirely replace content, and if the content is to be this sort of fantastic network of vistas and concepts then it should at least provide a certain understanding to its public, some light along the dark alley. Lost Highway is interesting visually, pretty enjoyable to watch, but it really doesn't amount to anything of any valuable quality when it comes to an actual resolution of the plot and never provides the fullness in meaning, the satisfaction of understanding the whole. This film may have a compelling, abstract narrative to start with but it becomes so very self-indulgent towards about the last third, and it just goes on and on and on... Sincerely not a great film. Not as well made as 'Blue Velvet', to give an example, made a decade earlier. 5/10.

Inevitably viewers, on seeing LOST HIGHWAY for the first time, might ask what on earth is happening; or perhaps try to look for symbols in order to decode what director David Lynch has to say about contemporary American - specifically Californian - society.Perhaps it might be better to approach the film on its own terms as a meditation on the fluidity of identity, where Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is sentenced to death in the electric chair for the murder of his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), and subsequently morphs into Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who becomes involved with Alice Wakefield (also played by Arquette) and mobster Ed (Louis Eppolito). As the action unfolds, Alice morphs into Renee. Throughout the action a mysterious presence lurks, with a whitened face and forbidding air (Robert Blake); he ostensibly works for Ed, but he seems to be able to penetrate even the most private spaces.Lynch has chosen the most commonplace names for his two male characters to emphasize their ordinariness; they could be anyone we encounter in our daily lives. Nonetheless what happens within their imaginations is very different from their quotidian behaviors; they are both tortured souls either unable or unwilling to conquer the wild and often horrific promptings of their unconscious minds. Renee appears to be dead; but then she mysteriously resurfaces later on in the film. Alice at one point tells Pete "You will never have me," suggesting a male desire for possession that will never take place in a dystopian world.The "Lost Highway" of the title is frequently shown in point of view shot, as a vehicle travels up a deserted road at night, with only the road markings visible. This might be both physical as well as mental; a metaphor of the male protagonists' diseased minds as well as a representation of just how threatening a landscape can be, especially at night when there are no lights to illuminate the street.LOST HIGHWAY is the kind of movie that consciously resists interpretation, and justifiably so. It requires considerable attention on the viewers' part, not only to appreciate the subtleties of director Lynch's directorial technique, but to decode what is happening in a series of visually complicated sequences. It is the kind of film that demands repeated viewings - not necessary to "understand" it better, but to appreciate just how carefully Lynch constructs it.