movie review of mulholland drive

A twisted road through a landscape of dreams

It’s well known that David Lynch ‘s “Mulholland Dr.” was assembled from the remains of a cancelled TV series, with the addition of some additional footage filmed later. That may be taken by some viewers as a way to explain the film’s fractured structure and lack of continuity. I think it’s a delusion to imagine a “complete” film lurking somewhere in Lynch’s mind — a ghostly Director’s Cut that exists only in his original intentions. The film is openly dreamlike, and like most dreams it moves uncertainly down a path with many turnings.

It seems to be the dream of Betty ( Naomi Watts ), seen in the first shots sprawled on a bed. It continues with the story of how Betty came to Hollywood and how she ended up staying in the apartment of her aunt, but if we are within a dream there is no reason to believe that on a literal level. It’s as likely she only dreams of getting off a flight from Ontario to Los Angeles, being wished good luck by the cackling old couple who met her on the plane, and arriving by taxi at the apartment. Dreams cobble their contents from the materials at hand, and although the old folks turn up again at the end of the film their actual existence may be problematic.

The movie seems seductively realistic in several opening scenes however, as an ominous film noir sequence shows a beautiful woman in the back seat of a limousine on Mulholland Drive — that serpentine road that coils along the spine of the hills separating the city from the San Fernando Valley. The limo pulls over, the driver pulls a gun and orders his passenger out of the car, and just then two drag-racing hot rods hurtle into view and one of them strikes the limo, killing the driver and his partner. The stunned woman (Laura Elena Herring) staggers into some shrubbery and starts to climb down the hill — first crossing Franklin Dr., finally arriving at Sunset. Still hiding in shrubbery, she sees a woman leaving an apartment to get into a taxi, and she sneaks into the apartment and hides under a table.

Who is she? Let’s not get ahead of her. The very first moments of the film seemed like a bizarre montage from a jitterbug contest on a1950s TV show, and the hotrods and their passengers visually link with that. But people don’t dress like jitterbuggers and drag race on Mulholland at the time of the film (the 1990s), not in now-priceless antique hot rods, and the crash seems to have elements imported from an audition, perhaps, that will later be made much of.

I won’t further try your patience with more of this mix-and-match. Dreams need not make sense, I am not Freud, and at this point in the film it’s working perfectly well as a film noir. They need not make sense, either. Conventional movie cops turn up, investigate, and disappear for the rest of the film. Betty discovers the woman from Mulholland taking a shower in her aunt’s apartment and demands to know who she is. The woman sees a poster of Rita Hayworth in “Gilda” on the wall and replies, “Rita.” She claims to have amnesia. Betty now responds with almost startling generosity, deciding to help “Rita” discover her identity, and in a smooth segue the two women bond. Indeed, before long they’re helping each other sneak into apartment #17. Lynch has shifted gears from a film noir to a much more innocent kind of crime story, a Nancy Drew mystery. When they find the decomposing corpse in #17, however, that’s a little more detailed than Nancy Drew’s typical discoveries.

What I’ve been doing is demonstrating the way “Mulholland Dr.” affects a lot of viewers. They start rehearsing the plot to themselves, hoping that if they retrace their steps they can determine where they are and how they got there. This movie doesn’t work that way. Each step has a way of being like an open elevator door with no elevator inside.

Unsatisfied by my understanding of the film, I took it to an audience that hadn’t failed me for 30 years. At the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I did my annual routine: Showing a title on Monday afternoon, and then sifting through it a scene at a time, sometimes a shot at a time, for the next four afternoons. It drew a full house, and predictably a lot of readings and interpretations. Yet even my old friend who was forever finding everything to be a version of Homer’s Odyssey was uncertain this time.

I gave my usual speech about how you can’t take an interpretation to a movie. You have to find it there already. No consensus emerged about what we had found. It was a tribute to Lynch that the movie remained compulsively watchable while refusing to yield to interpretation. The most promising direction we tried was to delineate the boundaries of the dreams(s) and the identities of the dreamer(s).

That was an absorbing exercise, but then consider the series of shots in which the film loses focus and then the women’s faces begin to merge. I was reminded of Bergman’s “ Persona ,” also a film about two women. At a point when one deliberately causes an injury to the other, the film seems to catch on fire in the projector. The screen goes black, and then the film starts again with images from the earliest days of silent film. What is Bergman telling us? Best to start over again? What is Lynch telling us? Best to abandon the illusion that all of this happens to two women, or within two heads?

What about the much-cited lesbian scenes? Dreams? We all have erotic dreams, but they are more likely inspired by desires than experiences, and the people in them may be making unpaid guest appearances. What about the film’s material involving auditions? Those could be stock footage in any dream by an actor. The command about which actress to cast? That leads us around to the strange little man in the wheelchair, issuing commands. Would anyone in the film’s mainstream have a way of knowing such a figure existed?

And what about the whatever-he-is who lurks behind the diner? He fulfills the underlying purpose of Lynch’s most consistent visual strategy in the film. He loves to use slow, sinister sideways tracking shots to gradually peek around corners. There are a lot of those shots in the aunt’s apartment. That’s also the way we sneak up to peek around the back corner of the diner. When that figure pops into view, the timing is such that you’d swear he knew someone — or the camera — was coming. It’s a classic BOO! moment and need not have the slightest relationship to anything else in the film.

David Lynch loves movies, genres, archetypes and obligatory shots. “ Mulholland Drive ” employs the conventions of film noir in a pure form. One useful definition of noirs is that they’re about characters who have committed a crime or a sin, are immersed with guilt, and fear they’re getting what they eserve. Another is that they’ve done nothing wrong, but it nevertheless certainly appears as if they have.

The second describes Hitchcock’s favorite plot, the Innocent Man Wrongly Accused. The first describes the central dilemma of “Mulholland Dr.” Yet it floats in an uneasy psychic space, never defining who sinned. The film evokes the feeling of noir guilt while never attaching to anything specific. A neat trick. Pure cinema.

This film is streaming on Netflix Instant. Also in my Great Movies Collection: “Persona.”

You can comment under my related blog post on the film, here .

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Mulholland Dr.

Now playing.

Devara: Part 1

Will & Harper

Amber Alert

The Universal Theory

I, The Executioner

The Apprentice

Daddy’s Head

Latest articles

A Careful Performer: Maggie Smith (1934-2024)

Home Entertainment Guide: September 2024

New York Film Festival 2024: Preview and Thoughts on “The Brutalist,” “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

Azrael (IFC Films) Samara Weaving Interview

The Registers of Fear: Samara Weaving on “Azrael”

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

User Ratings
External Reviews
Metacritic Reviews
Full Cast and Crew
Release Dates
Official Sites
Company Credits
Filming & Production
Technical Specs
Plot Summary
Plot Keywords
Parents Guide

Did You Know?

Crazy Credits
Alternate Versions
Connections
Soundtracks

Photo & Video

Photo Gallery
Trailers and Videos

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

About Rotten Tomatoes®
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening This Week
Top Box Office
Coming Soon to Theaters
Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most Popular Streaming Movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

98% The Wild Robot Link to The Wild Robot
100% Girls Will Be Girls Link to Girls Will Be Girls
100% Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story Link to Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

New TV Tonight

100% Colin from Accounts: Season 2
100% Matlock: Season 1
100% Brilliant Minds: Season 1
75% Murder in a Small Town: Season 1
50% Rescue: HI-Surf: Season 1
75% Grotesquerie: Season 1
93% Nobody Wants This: Season 1
-- Everybody Still Hates Chris: Season 1
-- Doctor Odyssey: Season 1
-- Social Studies: Season 1

Mulholland Dr. Reviews

David Lynch's masterpiece. A surreal neo-noir that explores the dark corners of the mind and heart, as well as the Hollywood dream. A film that gets better with each viewing. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 31, 2023

Just as with life, Mulholland Dr. is unexplainable.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2023

The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can't stop watching it... This is a movie to surrender yourself to.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 11, 2023

If, in the end, Mulholland Drive is too clever by half, no matter. Lynch's superb command of mise en scène makes his images and situations their own reward, rendering even the simplest gesture creepy and imbuing any innocence with evil.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2023

More than any Lynch movie since Eraserhead, this noir-ish Hollywood saga has the shadowy texture and pliant foundation of a dream. Or a nightmare. Or both.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 11, 2023

Few will be able to resist its heady sense of intrigue and two riveting lead performances by Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring.

Mulholland Drive is thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual.

Step back at the end and take in the whole experience of film and you might find that it assumes a certain logical coherence.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 11, 2023

Surrealistic? Expressionistic? Decide for yourselves. But don't discount the power and genius of David Lynch, even when he makes movies you cannot understand.

Dreams don't make sense. Dreams don't finish or begin or come with explanations. Ultimately, that's what Mulholland Drive is about: dreams, identity, and, naturally, Hollywood, where dreams and identity get blurry.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 11, 2023

Nearly every scene -- from the effervescent, jitterbugging opening to the scabrous final grotesqueries -- is spellbinding to watch and impossible to decipher.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 11, 2023

A bone fide masterpiece. An erotic, deeply unsettling, darkly comic journey through the subconscious city of night.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 11, 2023

Mulholland Drive is a puzzle without the courtesy of hinting how the picture is supposed to look when assembled. That's a blessing in this movie year, to find a piece of work both frustrating and exhilarating when so many movies don't even try.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 11, 2023

Mulholland Drive is an absorbing tour de force by one of today's most daring filmmakers at the top of his form.

It's a multilayered, surprisingly resonant mind-boggler about illusions, delusions, greed, jealousy, guilt, power, rotting aspirations, the mutability of identity, the act of acting and Hollywood's seamy underbelly.

More than anything else, Mulholland Drive is an incredible cinematic experience. You laugh, you wince, you fall in love, you hold your breath, you cringe, you mutter "Oh my God."

The result leaves us with dueling reactions: one, frustration with the intriguing plot lines introduced only to be abandoned; and two, a somewhat twisted satisfaction in a mystery that remains a mystery.

Mulholland Drive is a twisty, lengthy road, worth cruising into its mysteries.

Destined to be everyone's favourite piece of pretentious nonsense, Mulholland Drive is nonetheless brilliant and very watchable, even when you don't know exactly what you're watching.

Much of the film unfolds in satisfying fashion as a compelling mystery of dark allure set amongst the much-maligned environment of Hollywood.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 11, 2023

Mulholland Drive Review

04 Jan 2002

147 minutes

Mulholland Drive

For some, The Straight Story was evidence that David Lynch was at last emerging from the twisted obsessions of his oeuvre thus far. The director's elegiac ode to one man and his lawn tractor embraced some of the more established conventions of cinema - a linear narrative structure being chief among them.

For others, the film was a moribund dalliance with the mainstream that was unforgivably lacking in Lynchian trademarks - dwarves, weird sex and the realm of nightmares that teems beneath society's veneer of normality. Those in the latter camp should rejoice, then, because in Mulholland Drive, David Lynch gets Lynchian with a vengeance.

Linear narrative is, of course, conspicuous by its absence, but in its place Lynch orchestrates a liquid, undulating dreamscape that is at once beautiful, heartrending, madly confusing and, quite honestly, awe-inspiring in its daring and execution.

Set in a hyper-noir L.A., enveloped in night the colour and texture of a bruise, the film pulsates with disquiet. And with the waving, anemone strands of its storylines, Lynch weaves a tapestry of unease.

Occasionally sequences descend into bizarre farce or climax with the horror that they appear to promise. But more often events proceed with mounting, unaccountable menace. One of the most disturbing scenes, almost unbearably portentous, involves Naomi Watts simply making a cup of coffee.

At a point where the plot seems poised on the brink of resolution, the film suddenly folds in on itself, literally disappearing into a black hole from which it reappears more contrary than ever. That this is, in fact, the twist that binds the threads together probably won't occur to you until long after the credits roll. But then, this isn't a film to be followed in the traditional sense; it's one to let wash over you, one to wallow in.

The Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring

Movies | 23 01 2022

Movies | 27 03 2017

Movies | 02 02 2016

Movies | 25 06 2003

Movies | 06 01 2003

Movies | 24 02 2002

Movies | 07 01 2002

Movies | 14 12 2001

Cookie banner

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy . Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use , which became effective December 20, 2019.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Follow The Ringer online:

Follow The Ringer on Twitter
Follow The Ringer on Instagram
Follow The Ringer on Youtube

Filed under:

Pop Culture

‘Mulholland Drive’ Is Still David Lynch’s Crowning Achievement

Twenty years after the release of the director’s gloriously specific and frustrating masterpiece, it stands as an unparalleled, idiosyncratic work of cinema

Share this story

Share this on Facebook
Share this on Twitter
Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: ‘Mulholland Drive’ Is Still David Lynch’s Crowning Achievement

In 1999, David Lynch released The Straight Story, a road movie that was also a detour into G-rated territory; as signs of the impending Y2K apocalypse went, the guy behind Eraserhead working for Disney was suitably ominous. Two years later, though, Lynch returned to mind-fuck form with Mulholland Drive, a Los Angeles–set story about an aspiring actress trying to help a beautiful amnesiac rediscover her identity while showing the town’s power brokers that she’s ready for her close-up. “David Lynch has been working toward Mulholland Drive all of his career,” wrote Roger Ebert, a longtime skeptic of the director’s neo-surrealist style and methodology. When the film was released in October 2001, it proved to be a surprisingly potent box office force, grossing $20 million worldwide and spawning an online cottage industry of essays and explainers showing viewers how to make sense of its fractured, intractable narrative.

In the two decades since then, Lynch has produced other significant work, but Mulholland Drive still looks like the summative triumph described by Ebert: a movie that works equally well as a gateway into the director’s oeuvre or a culmination of his obsessions and fetishes. On the 20th anniversary of this inexhaustible masterpiece , here are 20 reasons to love it—or maybe 20 attempts to describe exactly what it is.

It’s Not TV

The smashed television set that inaugurates Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me served as a ready-made symbol of Lynch’s disillusionment with the prime-time establishment, which is why it was so odd that he tried to hook up with ABC on the first incarnation of Mulholland Drive. Originally written and shot as a 90-minute pilot, the project first enticed and then alienated ABC executives; in interviews, Lynch recalled how one suit with his finger on the green light watched the first cut standing up at six in the morning with coffee in hand. He hated it and canceled it on the spot. Given these beginnings, it’s easy to see why the resulting cinematic salvage job—mostly financed by French producers before premiering at Cannes in 2001—turned into such a sour allegory of L.A.’s assembly-line creative process, imagining a movie industry haunted by violence and despair and overrun at its highest level by thugs and know-nothings (one of whom is very particular about his coffee).

It’s a Highlight Reel

Great directors are repeat offenders, and their recidivism is unconscious. If Lynch is drawn toward the same types (and archetypes) in movie after movie, it’s not out of laziness or a lack of inspiration but a helpless devotion to his own artistic compulsions. Which is probably why his ninth feature checks so many boxes on the auteur scorecard, from the Hitchockian blonde/brunette dichotomy between Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring—shades of Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet —to the surreal criminal headquarters seemingly modeled on Twin Peaks ’ Black Lodge to the persona-swapping imagery that’s straight out of Lost Highway . While it (happily) didn’t turn out to be Lynch’s last feature or actual magnum opus (that’d be Twin Peaks: The Return ), Mulholland Drive feels like a grand summation of the director’s long-running themes and ideas about emotional and psychic instability, even as it twists and bends them into an exhilarating new configuration.

It’s … Robert Forster?

The car crash on Mulholland Drive that opens Mulholland Drive —in which a carload of teenagers smash into a luxury limousine—gives us two hallmarks of any good procedural: a bloody crime scene and a missing person in the form of Laura Elena Harring’s sole survivor, who stumbles out of the back of the limo bloody, battered, and in a catatonic trance. The detective who draws the case is played by Robert Forster, who was coming off an Oscar nomination for Jackie Brown and was arguably the biggest name in the cast. He then proceeds to do … nothing … except agree with his partner that, yes, it looks like somebody’s missing, maybe. Revamping his ABC material for the feature film format, Lynch was liberated to drop extraneous supporting characters and delete scenes , and the end run he does around cop-movie clichés by stranding Forster in a puzzling one-scene cameo is like a declaration of artistic principles. This isn’t going to go the way you think.

It’s Naomi Watts!

By casting the then mostly unknown Watts in the lead role of Betty Elms in Mulholland Drive, Lynch simultaneously made a star and a friend for life. Watch any video about their creative partnership and you’ll easily notice the mixture of gratitude and respect radiating off of Watts. In an interview with The Guardian in 2017, she recalled the late ’90s as a soul-destroying period in which casting directors continually blew her off. Then, suddenly, she was called to L.A. to audition for Lynch based solely on a headshot. “I saw someone who had a beautiful soul,” Lynch told the Los Angeles Times , and our first impression of Betty—introduced descending an escalator at LAX—is that of a blissful innocent, a refugee from small-town Canada (“Deep River, Ontario”) taking her best shot in the City of Dreams. That sunny, girl-next-door radiance is at once sincere and an act of pure subterfuge, and the key to Watts’s performance is how it keeps subdividing beneath the surface, revealing strength, loyalty, resourcefulness, and a ferocious self-possession on the verge of curdling into something decidedly non-innocuous. Betty is a cliché with unexpectedly bottomless depths, and as Mulholland Drive goes on, Watts takes the character—and us—into some seriously sunken places.

It’s a Throwback

Seeking shelter in a seemingly empty Hollywood apartment, Harring’s nameless amnesiac takes a shower and glimpses a reflection of a vintage movie poster in the bathroom vanity mirror: the statuesque Rita Hayworth as the title character in 1946’s Gilda . Later, when Betty asks her her name, she answers “Rita,” which not only aligns her with Hayworth’s character—a kept woman suffering in a loveless marriage—but the larger noir tradition that Lynch subsumes into his own L.A. story. Harring’s dark, furtive beauty is on a different continuum than Hayworth’s sultry strut, but she inhabits a similar femme fatale archetype. Like Gilda before her, Rita exists in Mulholland Drive as an object of desire, and even if Lynch ultimately uses Old Hollywood glamour to subversively evoke obsolescence and decay, he allows himself (and Harring) a few stolen moments of seductive beauty.

It’s a Horror Movie

No brief history of jump scares is complete without The Man Behind the Diner , a demonic hobo played by actress Bonnie Aarons beneath scraggly hair and greasepaint. After being alluded to fearfully by Patrick Fischler’s Dan as he recounts a night terror (“I hope I never see that face ever outside of a dream”), the Man—officially credited as Bum—leans suddenly and unforgettably into view, and like Twin Peaks ’ Killer Bob before him, he’s ready for his close-up. Few filmmakers have Lynch’s ability to weaponize camerawork and editing against the audience. The Bum makes a return appearance during Mulholland Drive ’s coda as a kind of cryptic puppet-master figure, recasting Dan’s anxious insistence that “he’s the one who’s doing it” as prophecy, but as with most of the movie’s finest bits, meaning doesn’t matter. What lasts is the feeling in the pit of your stomach.

It’s Billy Ray Cyrus?!

Before shooting the scene where his character, film director Adam Kesher, gets the shit kicked out of him by the pool guy who’s sleeping with his wife, Justin Theroux straight-up asked Lynch what was going on only to be told, “I don’t know, buddy, let’s find out.” “It’s like you’re on an escalator into a cloud,” Theroux recalled in a June 2021 interview this June with IndieWire .

That confusion mirrors his character’s: For the first hour of the movie, Adam is the most bewildered guy onscreen, an auteur with no control over his situation. As an addendum to his myriad on-the-job humiliations at the helm of a period drama being recast on the fly by shadowy showbiz gangsters, Adam’s cucking makes sense, but it’s the presence of pop-cultural punch line Billy Ray Cyrus as the other man that cinches the surrealism—the same subconsciously illogical effect David Chase tried for when he cast Annette Bening as herself in The Sopranos ’ expressly Lynchian “The Test Dream.” Kudos to Billy Ray for nailing his role as the beefy, oddly chivalrous Gene, who tells Adam, “That ain’t no way to treat your wife, buddy,” before tossing him and his achy breaky heart out of his own house.

It’s Satire

In Lost Highway , Lynch had Robert Loggia’s Mr. Eddy assault a tailgater in full view of the Hollywood sign as a dig at what he perceived as thuggish industry sensibilities. In retrospect, that film, Mulholland Drive , and Inland Empire form a caustic trilogy about the business of filmmaking contextualizing Lynch’s drift away from mainstream modes of production. Mulholland ’s plot pivots on the premise that the Mob runs La La Land, as Betty’s attempts at making it big are thwarted by a consortium of power brokers pushing a different starlet. “This is the girl,” insists Luigi Castigliane (Angelo Badalamenti), brandishing a glossy headshot at a meeting with Kesher while his brother Vincenzo (Dan Hedaya) threateningly informs the auteur, “It is no longer your film.” The crime-movie tropes are playful and absurd—as when Luigi demands and then regurgitates a “perfect” espresso from a studio executive—but serve the overall vision of a dream factory that’s corroded from the inside out.

It’s Frustrating (in a Good Way!)

Like his surrealist predecessor Luis Buñuel, Lynch understands the language of dreams—particularly the way that scenes glimpsed during sleep have no real beginning or end . What that means in Mulholland Drive is precious little exposition and even less closure, especially when it comes to subplots like the one where hitman Joe Messing (Mark Pellegrino) bungles a routine assignment and ends up killing a witness to cover his ass. That slapstick shoot-out is chaotic and horrifying, but most notably, it’s never mentioned again. The non sequitur shape of the storytelling is again partly a byproduct of the fact that so much material was shot as a TV pilot, but it’s also a perfect expression of how buried thoughts and anxieties enter our mind’s eye unbidden, and a challenge to audience viewing habits that require a strict 1-to-1 ratio of cause-to-effect. Frustration isn’t a bug in Lynch’s cinema, but an operating guideline.

It’s Naomi Watts! Part 2

For the first half of Mulholland Drive , we’re unsure whether Betty is really a “great actress” as she imagines herself, or is just another pretty face waiting to be disabused of her illusions. Rehearsing her big audition scene with Rita, she’s stilted, halting, and dubious about the material—it seems like the part is impossible to play. But when she gets her chance to read opposite sleazy, aged matinee idol Jimmy Katz (Chad Everett), an amazing thing happens: Betty’s good-girl act evaporates and this bundle of raw, exposed nerves emerges in its place, hotwiring the scene—and her scene partner—into the stuff of electric, psychosexual melodrama. “Don’t play it for real until it becomes real,” advises the hapless hack director, but Betty doesn’t need pointers to blur the lines between acting and being, and the confirmation of her talent comes with a hint that there’s something unsettlingly authentic behind all that technique . And of course, watching Betty become a great actress means watching Watts in the process of being one as well; like many scenes in Mulholland Drive , the audition serves nicely as a meta-commentary on itself.

It’s a Musical

Ever since Blue Velvet ’s wryly chipper Hardy Boys pastiche, Lynch had been mining mid-20th-century pop culture for shivery effect. The use of Linda Scott’s hit 1961 single “I’ve Told Every Little Star” in Mulholland Drive ranks with his greatest coups. As Betty—flush with confidence from her audition—arrives for a meeting with Adam on the set of The Sylvia North Story , we see another starlet (Melissa George) in Doris Day drag lip-synching to Scott’s hit as a camera test. This, we recognize, is the girl, and Adam will have no choice but to cast her, even though the meaningful looks he’s exchanging with Betty during the performance hint that he’d rather give the new ingenue a shot. The slow cutting between George’s perky, ersatz performance in front of the lens and the longing glances happening behind encapsulate the gap between fantasy and reality that powers the film’s tragic dialectic. In this explicitly counterfeit context, the chipper “dum da dums” of the song’s open-hearted chorus are rendered ominous and haunting—doo-wop as a haunted funeral march.

It’s Softcore

There’s no way around it, so we might as well say it: The sequence where Betty and Rita go to bed together is extremely sexy, charged in equal parts by terror—the girls are coming off the discovery of a mouldering corpse in an apartment—and a tender sense of mutual dependence. “Have you ever done this before?” asks Betty tentatively, underlying the slightly stilted adult-entertainment vibes while inadvertently goofing on her partner’s amnesia; “I don’t know, have you?” is the breathy response.

Because Lynch has already established the luridness of his Los Angeles setting and proposed Betty and Rita’s friendship as an antidote to it, their plunge into unknown waters feels less prurient than exhilarating—the logical culmination of a plangent emotional bond. But there’s more going on here too: Rita’s blonde wig and the Bergman-esque post-coital shot showing the women’s faces blending together hints that what we’re seeing is a byproduct of Betty’s fantasy life—the wet dream of an unrequited lover, streaked with sweat and tears.

It’s a Musical, Part 2

“Llorando” translates to “Crying,” and chanteuse Rebekah Del Rio’s cover of the Roy Orbison standard is a genuine showstopper. For three minutes, the singer holds our hearts in her throat as she belts out a story of loneliness, abandonment, and melancholy that transcends the need for subtitles. But she’s not really singing: Like “Every Little Star” before it, “Llorando” has been lip-synched, a revelation that reduces Betty and Rita to red-eyed hysterics as they watch from the upper balcony at the enigmatic after-hours venue Club Silencio. If the song isn’t real, then neither, perhaps, is their love, and as Del Rio faints to the sounds of her own recorded voice, it’s as if the movie itself were getting shaken out of a reverie. Nothing beautiful is as it seems, and on the other side of “Llorando,” nothing will be the same. It’s an aria that concludes the dream story of Mulholland Drive and builds a bridge toward a nightmarish reality.

It’s a Puzzle

When Mulholland Drive was released on DVD, Lynch took the unusual—and self-contradictory—step of including 10 clues that he believed could help viewers “solve” the movie. Given the director’s characteristic and endearing averseness to explanation , the clues were taken by many as red herrings, but they do illuminate some of the film’s more elusive aspects, including minute details of production design (“notice the appearances of the red lampshade”) and geography (“notice the location of the accident”). After the scene at Club Silencio, Betty and Rita return to Aunt Ruth’s , where Rita uses a key to open a blue box, which the camera plunges into as if entering a wormhole.“Who gives a key, and why?” asks Lynch, simultaneously playing with his own mandate to “unlock” his masterpiece and drawing attention to Betty’s final attempt to help Rita solve the mystery of her own missing identity. It’s the last time in the film that Betty and Rita will be recognizable as the characters we’ve come to know and love, and it anticipates a second, more sinister exchange with a key that swaps out a gesture of support for one of vengeance.

It’s a Wake-up Call

Our reintroduction to Watts in the last section of Mulholland Drive is startling: hair darker and dirtier, teeth crooked, eyes blank and staring, she could be Betty’s reanimated zombie doppelgänger. Reality bites: This is Diane Selwyn, who shares Betty’s vocation and ambition but none of her surface charm. This is the woman who emerged during the audition, and who’s been lurking in the shadows all along—an antiheroine whose actual experiences in California are revealed as the grotesque obverse of all that’s come before. Instead of sweeping an amnesiac damsel in distress off her feet, she fell in love with a movie star—Camilla Rhodes, also played by Harring—and got dumped. Instead of being the victim of backstage intrigue, she channeled her frustrations into a murder plot that’s left her suicidally guilt-ridden. “Hey, pretty girl. Time to wake up,” a voice says on the soundtrack right before we meet Diane. That sudden, terrible jolt into awareness serves as Mulholland Drive ’s pitiless, pitch-black punch line.

It’s a Remake of The Wizard of Oz

Lynch has spoken often of his reverence for The Wizard of Oz , and the simplest way to frame Mulholland Drive is as a modern transplant of the 1939 classic, with Betty/Diane as a tragic Dorothy manqué and the other characters in the first two-thirds of the film as projections of her dismal experiences in Hollywood. Whether or not this calculus adds up exactly, it plugs into the complex mixture of yearning and anxiety at the heart of The Wizard of Oz , whose heroine longs for escape only to discover that the world beyond Kansas is a lethal, frightening place. The difference is that for Betty/Diane, there’s no going back to Deep River, Ontario. Instead, she has to live—and die—with her demons in a motel room over the rainbow.

It’s Devastating

Assuming that the prevailing interpretation of Mulholland Drive as a suicidal woman’s subconscious attempt to put a happy face on bad times is accurate, the film’s sadness becomes inescapable; Betty and her intrepid optimism were never more than an illusion (or a delusion) and instead of being waylaid by Hollywood corruption, Diane was consumed by it to the point that her jealousy led her to take out a hit on her ex. If there’s something sadistic about the film’s downward spiraling structure, it’s also surpassingly humane; just because Mulholland Drive exposes its protagonist’s movie-addled coping mechanisms doesn’t mean that Lynch (or the audience) doesn’t understand or sympathize with them. It’s because we miss Betty that we feel for Diane. The latter’s abjection matters only because we can still see her alter ego flickering sweetly behind her eyes.

It’s Too Good for the Oscars

Despite getting plenty of love from critics’ groups, Mulholland Drive scored a single, lonely Oscar nomination for Lynch for Best Director. Today, the shutout of Watts from the Best Actress category still stands as an egregious snub. In 1987, Lynch had attended the ceremony clutching a piece of blue velvet for good luck before his outsider bid lost to Oliver Stone. Fifteen years later, he didn’t seem to care one bit about being bested by Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind —a choice that made sense only to the less-than-beautiful minds that make up AMPAS’s various voting blocs. In a famously off-the-cuff moment , Lynch could be seen commiserating with fellow legend and loser (for Gosford Park ) Robert Altman, a game-recognize-game encounter that clarifies the difference between official and unofficial canonization. Has anyone watched A Beautiful Mind since 2002? Will anybody ever watch it again?

It’s Endlessly Rewatchable

It’s one thing to say that a movie requires multiple viewings in order to pull it together, but the last thing Mulholland Drive feels like is homework. Sensations of recurrence and déjà vu are key to the movie’s hypnotic power; what feels uncanny the first time around retains the same disarming feeling on the 20th revisitation. Not all of Lynch’s movies are so easy to fall into time and time again. But Mulholland Drive is brilliantly accessible, starting with its gorgeous, charismatic leads and extending through its voluptuously beautiful cinematography and score and its unmistakable tingles of noir precedent and pleasure. And because the clear standout moments—the songs, the audition, the sex scene, everything with the Cowboy —are so elegantly spaced out, you can enjoy it like a favorite album where it’s permissible to zone out in between the hits.

It’s an All-Timer

In 2016, Mulholland Drive was selected as the greatest film of the 21st century in an international poll conducted by the BBC, but the more significant showing may have come in 2012 as part of Sight and Sound ’s long-running, decennial all-time list—the same survey that established Citizen Kane at the top of the historical pecking order back in the 1960s. Forty critics voted for Lynch’s film, placing it at no. 28, the second best ranking for any movie made after 1990 (after In the Mood for Love at no. 24). It’s strange that a film so designed to support multiple interpretations has cultivated such a broad consensus, yet it’s already a standard-bearer for contemporary American art cinema—a victory of individual creative vision over algorithmic calculations. Even as it reflects and refracts aspects of Lynch’s career before and since—and plays with Hollywood iconography of multiple eras—it feels singular and original. This is the film.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

Next Up In Movies

Lionsgate, meta, and a wild week in ai.

Beenado, Internet Hot Girl Shit, ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,’ and More!
‘Wolfs’ Is a Clooney and Pitt Reunion. Is It Anything Else? Plus: Five Movies You Need to See This Month.
‘Agatha All Along’ Episode 3 Reactions and Revisiting ‘Joker’
‘Wolfs’ Leans on George Clooney and Brad Pitt Until It Falls Over
Biggest Movie Vanity Project

Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter

Thanks for signing up.

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

New York Knicks v Minnesota Timberwolves

The Karl-Anthony Towns Trade Could Haunt the Knicks and Wolves

So much for the Nova Knicks. New York is now going all in on a different kind of KAT. But will the surprise blockbuster backfire for both contenders?

Memphis Grizzlies vs Minnesota Timberwolves

KNICKS TRADE FOR KAT

The Knicks reportedly acquire Karl-Anthony Towns and trade away Julius Randle and Dante DiVincenzo

Santa Monica Exteriors And Landmarks - 2020

Matt is joined by Justine Bateman—writer, director, producer, and SAG-AFTRA negotiation committee consultant on the use of AI—to check in on the latest developments on AI in entertainment

‘The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ Reactions

Ben summons Justin Charity to get into the new ‘Legend of Zelda’ game, catch up on some recent news in the world of TV and video games, and more

Arsenal Has Embraced Winning Ugly. They’ll Need to Do More to Win the Title.

Rodri’s injury has opened the door for Arsenal to win the Premier League this season. But the Gunners haven’t shown they’re ready to seize the opportunity yet.

Los Angeles Clippers v Memphis Grizzlies

Georgia-Bama Preview and the Top Tier of CFB With Bruce Feldman, Derrick Rose Retires, Plus Gordon Hayward Stops By

Plus, Ceruti breaks down Ryen’s golf game

Share full article

Supported by

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Hollywood, A Funhouse Of Fantasy

By Stephen Holden

Oct. 6, 2001

While watching ''Mulholland Drive,'' you might well wonder if any film maker has taken the cliché of Hollywood as ''the dream factory'' more profoundly to heart than David Lynch. The newest film from the creator of ''Blue Velvet'' and ''Twin Peaks'' is a nervy full-scale nightmare of Tinseltown that seizes that concept by the throat and hurls it through the looking glass.

By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with ''Mulholland Drive.'' Its frenzied final 45 minutes, in which the story circles back on itself in a succession of kaleidoscopic Chinese boxes, conveys the maniacal thrill of an imagistic brainstorm.

The notion of Hollywood as the world capital of corrupt, twisted fantasy is hardly new, thanks to Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Roman Polanski and countless others. But in wrestling with that notion, Mr. Lynch makes an extraordinary leap to embrace the irrational. Its sheer audacity and the size of its target make the director's earlier eviscerations of idyllic American oases and the rot beneath them seem comparatively petty. In taking on Hollywood, of course, Mr. Lynch is biting a hand that has fed him off and on, even though the Hollywood depicted by the film is a dream world that bears only a passing resemblance to the everyday film business of corporate yuppie sharpshooters.

Mr. Lynch's distillation of Hollywood vibrates weirdly between the present and the pop cultural climate of 40 years ago. It is a place where a ludicrous monster in a bear costume hides behind a graffiti-spattered Denny's-like restaurant. In Mr. Lynch's Hollywood, authoritarian moguls of the Otto Preminger type still assert an imperial will in offices that feel like giant mausoleums.

Mr. Lynch's women also hark back to the perfectly coiffed blond heroines of Alfred Hitchcock's ''Vertigo'' and ''Marnie,'' while the music of Angelo Badalamenti, his favorite composer, is a Mannerist echo of Hitchcock's musical main man, Bernard Herrmann. The shiny pink songs that jingle through ''Mulholland Drive'' are the glittery baubles of 40 years ago sung by Connie Stevens and Linda Scott. As in ''Blue Velvet,'' a Roy Orbison ballad (''Crying,'' sung stunningly a cappella and in Spanish by Rebekah Del Rio) supplies an expressionistic flourish.

''Mulholland Drive,'' which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight and tomorrow afternoon at Alice Tully Hall (it opens commercially on Monday), is a fascinating example of how a great film can evolve out of adversity. Begun as a pilot for an open-ended television series much like ''Twin Peaks,'' it was reconfigured into a feature film after being rejected for television. That history is embodied in the structure of the movie, which begins as a leisurely contemporary film noir with surreal touches, then suddenly changes its form and blasts off toward outer (or is it inner?) space.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

Want all of The Times? Subscribe .

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

For Parents
For Educators
Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

How to Share Screen Time Rules with Relatives, Babysitters, and Other Caregivers

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Parents' guide to, mulholland drive.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 11 Reviews
Kids Say 12 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

By Nell Minow , based on child development research. How do we rate?

Fascinating movie for adults only.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 18+?

Nudity, explicit lesbian encounter, masturbation, sexual references.

Very strong language.

Drinking and smoking.

A dead body and disturbing images.

Any Positive Content?

Sex, romance & nudity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents need to know that this movie has very explicit nudity and sexual situations, including lesbian encounters and masturbation. It also has very strong language, violence, a dead body, and disturbing images. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (11)
Kids say (12)

Based on 11 parent reviews

What's the Story?

David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE is not a story but a mosaic of stories, eras, moods, characters, and themes that intersect, overlap, and parallel like a dream. A luscious brunette (Laura Harring) is about to be shot by a limo driver when a car filled with carousing teenagers slams into the limo. The brunette limps away and hides out in an apartment. She has amnesia, and when asked her name, she says "Rita," as in Rita Hayworth. Betty (Naomi Watts), a fresh-faced ingenue hoping to make it as an actress in LA, tries to help Rita find out who she is. Meanwhile, young director Adam (Justin Theroux) is pressured by some very dangerous-looking guys to give a particular actress the lead in his new movie. Themes of dreams and reality, identity and anonymity, innocence and corruption, creativity and conformity, ripple and resonate in the scenes that follow. Eventually, Betty turns into Diane, who used to be dead, and Betty's aunt's landlady, or is it Adam's mother, is played by 1940's musical star Ann Miller, and all of this does not seem as out of place as it otherwise might. Betty tells Rita that she wants to help her solve the mystery because "It'll be just like in the movies."

Is It Any Good?

If you like movies that make sense, Mulholland Drive isn't for you. On the other hand, if Twin Peaks was just too upbeat and linear for you and you feel that the references in Blue Velvet were just too obvious and jejune, then this movie is for you. Watts and Herring are outstanding. Betty practices her corny audition scene with Rita with a competent but conventional reading. Then, when she gets to the audition, she completely turns it around, leaving us as breathless as the characters in the scene. Watts later suddenly becomes an entirely different character who has an entirely different history with "Rita" and carries it off splendidly.

Lynch cast unknowns as the leads but populated the margins of the film with old-time stars and semi-stars. This embellishes his themes and adds to the dreamy, half-remembered quality of the story. In addition to Miller, the cast includes Lee Grant, Robert Forster, and the star of the 1960's television show, Medical Center , Chad Everett.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about David Lynch's avant-garde approach to filmmaking.

Movie Details

In theaters : October 12, 2001
On DVD or streaming : April 9, 2002
Cast : Billy Ray Cyrus , Laura Harring , Naomi Watts
Director : David Lynch
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Universal Pictures
Genre : Drama
Run time : 147 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : violence, language and some strong sexuality
Last updated : June 4, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

The Usual Suspects

Thriller Movies

Thriller books for teens.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

Mulholland Drive Explanation

A first watch of Mulholland Dr. results into the following: A head scratch, confusion, brainstorming, realization, acceptance. Only after you accept that what you have watched is nothing short of a miracle, you go for a second watch, to appreciate the nuances, to laud at the filmmaking, the editing, the performances and to glean some sense out of the cerebral and haunting piece of cinema.

Not since Tarkovsky’s shocker of a film ‘Zerkalo’ has a film incited more discussions about its themes. A film that is discussed even today, around 15 years after its release and yet, not every question about the film has been answered. ‘Mulholland Dr.’, quite simply, offers the greatest cinematic mystery of all time.

In this article, we try to explain the major questions that you might have had and its various interpretations.

Now, at its surface and stripping the film down to the most banal meaning, ‘Mulholland Dr.’ is a movie about a struggling Hollywood actress, period. That much is evident in the first few shots of the movie. But therein lies the genius of David Lynch. It is like a perfect starter to a sumptuous main-course.

Is the first two-thirds of the film fantasy or reality? Who is actually Diane Selwyn?

The most obvious explanation of the movie is that the actress Betty is actually Diane Selwyn. The first two-thirds of the film is actually a perfect fantasy that is created by Betty (Diane) played by Naomi Watts. In the real world, she is depressed, washed up and suicidal. She wants to escape the piercing barbs of Hollywood, but she is sinking further and further, unable to cope with her failures.

Thematically, the clues to this are all there in the first few shots. The accident, the injured Diane Selwyn emerging from the car and leaving the scene of the accident. This is like the first layer of the struggling actress’s dreamscape, and becomes obvious only when someone watches the movie for the second time.

Actually, the car accident sequence is more important than we are giving it credit for. The accident signifies many things; Camilla (Laura Harring) picks Betty up at the same location and then takes her to the party, subsequently revealing the fact that Camilla and Adam are about to announce their engagement. It is a perfect starting point to decline of the capability of Betty’s mind to perceive reality.

Logically, this becomes evident in the restaurant scene when Diane hires a hitman to kill Camilla. In the restaurant, she sees the name-tag of the waitress, who is named ‘Betty’. It is here that Diane conceives the name Betty that she uses for herself in her dream.

This explanation gives a lot of food for thought about the nature of identity and stardom; Diane wants to be the perfect star. She wants to be the newbie, who rises through the ranks and eventually becomes a Hollywood superstar. This is the life she couldn’t have; the director she worked with, and is supposedly in love with, chooses another actress over her.

What does the Club Silencio sequence signify?

But what the hell was the theater or the Club Silencio all about? We think that the entire sort-of-opera sequence was the culmination of Betty’s dream. ‘Silencio’ – that’s the word at the end of the film, uttered possibly by the magician at the theater-cum-nightclub. It could mean the silence at the end of the Betty’s life – the real one, in which she has possibly committed suicide.

What are the cowboy and the hitman doing in the film? Are they relevant to the story?

Viewers would argue about the seemingly unnecessary storylines of the Director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), his twisted encounter with a lunatic cowboy, and the hitman going on a killing spree. But, once again, David Lynch surprises.

Adam Kesher’s plotline symbolizes the very basic struggle any artist faces – to please the men who have the money or to go with his/her guts. Commercialization vs Artistic freedom. And this ties into Betty’s dream rather conveniently. Betty wanted to be that star – directed by the creative powerhouse Adam Kesher. In her fantasy, she sees Adam struggling and fighting with his superiors to retain her. She sees what she always wanted to see – someone fighting for her. Someone realizing her talent. So, in the brilliantly moody sequence where Betty auditions for the part, this becomes all the more obvious. It is a part of her fantasy where she ‘gets the part; a major film role which could launch her career.

This fantasy again stems from the scene of the party; where Adam announces his engagement with Camilla. Which in turn originates from the scene of the accident, where the dream starts.

The mad killing spree of the hitman is actually Betty’s fantasy of the killer completing his assignment – that of killing Camilla. So you see, it’s all connected.

Who’s homeless man behind the Winkies Restaurant?

The homeless and very scary looking man that appears behind the Winkie’s is an enigma of sorts. What was Lynch’s motive behind showing him ? Actually, there is no perfect answer to this as there could be multiple interpretations of it, but the most logical one is that the man signifies the paranoia of Betty/Diane. Interestingly, the man appears in both the “dream” and “reality” half of the film, and that could be to indicate that Betty/Diane has an inherent fear lurking inside her mind; a fear of unknown. Lynch decided to give this fear .. a face.

But wait! What about the blue box and the key?

The blue box signifies many things. Inside the box, she has hidden away all her anguish, hysteria and depression – the components of her real life. Locking the box would mean hiding the reality, and constructing her fantasy. So when Rita opens the box, the dream falls apart. The blue box appears in Betty/Diane’s lap at the end of the opera. As I pointed out earlier, this is the culmination of her fantasy. Or rather, it signifies Diane/Betty waking up. The magician is forcing her to face the truth; to deconstruct her fantasy, to open the box and let the harsh truth come out.

Mulholland Drive is one of those cinematic marvels which come once in a decades. It is the stuff which dreams and delusions are made of. It is the brainchild of an artistic mastermind like none other. It is poetry in motion.

All in all, it is art. Pure and simple.

Mulholland Drive (United States/France, 2001)

There was a time when David Lynch made coherent, challenging motion pictures. Love it or hate it, there's no doubt that Blue Velvet was one of the most talked-about motion pictures of the 1980s. Some consider it to be a masterpiece, while others view it as exploitative trash. Nevertheless, at least the narrative makes sense. The script requires the viewer to pay attention, but everything ties together in a sensible manner. Something similar could be said about Lynch's next outing, Wild at Heart . It's a little more out there, but still not totally outrageous. Next came "Twin Peaks", the television series that started out as one of the most compelling hour-long dramas ever to air on a network before devolving into silliness. Lost Highway followed on the heels of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me , with neither picture telling a linear or comprehensible story. The Straight Story seemed to put Lynch on a different course, but, with Mulholland Drive , the filmmaker is back to his old tricks.

Mulholland Drive started life as a pilot for a TV series. When ABC rejected it outright, Lynch elected to shoot a series of new, lurid scenes to provide an ending of sorts. Watching the final project, it's easy to determine where this "break" occurs. The first 105 minutes of this movie are engrossing, and, for the most part, intelligible. There's no content that would be deemed unsuitable for television. Then, just as things go off the deep end, slipping into the realm of the incoherent, the two lead female characters remove their clothing and spend most of the final 40 minutes topless. As a TV series, Mulholland Drive might have been compelling stuff; as a movie, in large part because of Lynch's excuse for an "ending", it's a mess.

The film is structured as a mystery set in Hollywood, although, in typical Lynchian fashion, this version of Tineseltown is decidedly dark and skewed. The plot weaves together several strands: a young, fresh-looking Canadian girl who has come to La-la land in search of stardom; an established actress who avoids being murdered by an act of dumb luck, and loses her memory as a result; and a director who is being forced by ominous powers to cast a particular woman in his movie. It's all intriguing stuff. The cast is made up largely of unknowns: Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring. Robert Forster and Dan Hedaya have what amount to cameos (despite prominent billing - one assumes that had this become a weekly series, they would have been more evident).

The film is drenched in atmosphere. That shouldn't be a surprise. Credit the cinematography of Peter Deming and the score by Angelo Badalamenti. Mulholland Drive is filled with its share of "Twin Peaks"-ish moments. But, after a promising start and an engaging midsection, there's the third act to deal with. And it's not a pretty sight. Lynch cheats his audience, pulling the rug out from under us. He throws everything into the mix with the lone goal of confusing us. Nothing makes any sense because it's not supposed to make any sense. There's no purpose or logic to events. Lynch is playing a big practical joke on us. He takes characters we have come to care about and obscures their fates in gibberish. Some people will undoubtedly decide this is all very deep and will find hidden meanings in everything, but they're giving Lynch too much credit. This is not good filmmaking; it's immature and wasteful.

I suppose on some level I still want to recommend Mulholland Drive - it's a wonderfully stylish film, the score is incomparable, and the first two-thirds border on brilliant. But I despise with a white-hot passion what Lynch did with the ending. I was simmering with fury when I came out of the screening. And I wanted to throttle one critic who began chirping about the wonderfully existential manner in which things are "wrapped up". This is one route best taken by die-hard Lynch fans only. The rest of us can stick to the freeway.

Comments Add Comment

Rear Window (1954)
Sleuth (1969)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Neon Demon, The (2016)
Left Behind (2014)
Jade (1995)
Bumblebee (2018)
On the Basis of Sex (2018)
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Ten, The (2007)
Wanderlust (2012)
LEGO Ninjago Movie, The (2017)
21 Grams (2003)
Funny Games (2008)
King Kong (2005)
Ring 2, The (2005)
Diana (2013)
Demolition (2016)
(There are no more better movies of Laura Elena Harring)
Nancy Drew (2007)
(There are no more worst movies of Laura Elena Harring)

Mulholland Drive explained: A guide to David Lynch’s movie

Confused? Look no further...

Katie Rosseinsky
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on pinterest
Share on reddit
Email to a friend

A dark fable that turns the Hollywood dream into a nightmare, Mulholland Drive is often cited among the best films of the 21st century so far — and more than 20 years on from its release, it has proved enigmatic enough that viewers are still in thrall to its mysteries.

Director David Lynch, the man behind Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Eraserhead, is famed for his surreal narratives that almost always defy viewers’ attempts to explain away their mysteries — a quality that’s either deeply compelling or incredibly frustrating, depending on who you ask (or which Reddit threads you end up sucked into after watching).

Set in motion by a car crash on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, Lynch’s 2001 film stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in dual roles, with a cast that also includes Justin Theroux. Initially, it plays out like a stylised mystery against the backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, as Betty (Watts) attempts to help amnesiac Rita (Harring) discover her real identity. As the movie goes on, though, there are sinister hints that all is not as it seems, and soon the narrative breaks down, eventually shifting into a harsher reality in which the two women take on very different roles.

Lynch is a filmmaker who prefers to let his audience come to their own conclusions about his stories, meaning that in the years since Mulholland Drive’s release, he has offered relatively little in terms of clues about the movie’s meaning, and even his cast were left pretty much in the dark. Speaking about the film in 2021, Theroux revealed that the filmmaker “doesn’t answer your questions” on set, and described working with him as like being “on an escalator into a cloud… you never know where the escalator lets off.”

That sense of ambiguity is arguably one of the film’s enduring charms, but if you’ve been left baffled by Mulholland Drive on your first viewing, this cheat sheet should shed some light on its mysteries.

More like this

Get exclusive film newsletters from our award-winning editorial team.

By entering your details, you are agreeing to our terms and conditions and privacy policy . You can unsubscribe at any time.

Mulholland Drive explained - what is the dream theory?

According to one of the most common - and surprisingly coherent - interpretations of Lynch’s film, the first part of Mulholland Drive is best understood as a dream sequence, in which elements of the ‘real’ story are explored in heightened or distorted ways, until the protagonist Diane wakes up. It’s a clever play, too, on Hollywood as a dream factory, churning out illusions while often crushing the hopes of the people trapped in its machinery.

The film’s stars, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, each play two different characters, one who exists in the dream world, another in reality. Watts is first introduced to us as aspiring performer Betty, who is naive to the ways of Hollywood; in reality, her name is Diane Selwyn, a struggling actress who is in love with Camilla Rhodes, a successful film star, played by Harring. Their relationship has come to an end, Diane’s work, most of which has been acquired for her with Camilla’s help, is drying up and her ex is now engaged to film director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux).

In Mulholland Drive’s dream world, Camilla is Rita, the mysterious woman who turns up at Betty's aunt’s home with no memory of her past life after surviving the car crash which takes place right at the start of the film. In the fantasy, there’s another Adam, still a director, who Betty auditions for; Adam’s latest film, though, has been commandeered by mobsters who want to cast an unknown actress called Camilla Rhodes (played here by Melissa George, as if things weren’t confusing enough) in the lead role.

Betty and Rita attempt to piece together clues that might reveal the latter’s identity (her only belongings are a purse full of cash and a blue key) and head to a diner where the name of a waitress, Diane, jogs the latter’s memory, causing her to remember the name Diane Selwyn. They look her up in the phone book, and eventually track down her flat, discovering the corpse of a woman, presumably dream-Diane, in the apartment next door.

It’s around this point that things take a turn for the (yet more) surreal. The pair visit a nightclub, Club Silencio, where the sense of illusion is increasingly heightened: a singer comes on stage to perform the song Crying by Roy Orbison in Spanish, and although she collapses halfway through the track, her vocals continue. Soon after, Betty finds a blue box matching Rita’s key; when she opens it, it seems to contain nothing but darkness.

Then it’s back to reality, as Betty wakes up as Diane, in the apartment where the two women previously found the corpse. We learn about Diane and Camilla’s relationship, and the stark contrast in their career trajectories.

It soon becomes apparent that many of the characters and incidents in the dream have a parallel in real life: Betty herself is an idealised version of Diane at the start of her career, before she was burned by Hollywood, for example, while Coco, the landlady at Betty’s aunt’s apartment, is actually Adam’s mother, who appears at his and Camilla’s engagement party. We also learn that Diane and Camilla first met while auditioning for The Sylvia North Story, the same film that Betty tried out for - and was rejected from - in the dream.

Filled with jealousy after the engagement party, Diane meets a hitman at Winkie’s diner and arranges for him to kill Camilla; he promises that she will receive a blue key (another crossover from dream to reality) once the job is done. When she later sees the blue key in her apartment, she is overwhelmed by hallucinations and eventually shoots herself.

Which clues reveal it’s a dream?

Just before the film’s opening credits, we see a bed with red sheets, arguably our first hint that what is about to unfold is happening in the dream world; the same bed and sheets are later seen when Betty and Rita visit the apartment with the dead body, and then again when Betty / Diane wakes from the dream.

The character Louise, the next-door neighbour who has swapped apartments with dream-Diane’s, also acts as a link between dream and reality, warning Betty that “someone is in trouble, something bad is happening” and correcting her when she introduces herself with her dream identity. Perhaps the most obvious flag, though, is when the Cowboy appears to usher her back into reality, telling her “hey pretty girl, time to wake up.”

What do Betty and Rita represent?

One way of looking at Mulholland Drive’s first section is as a comment on Hollywood movie-making, and how the industry can flatten stories and characters into easily digestible tropes and characters as a way of making sense of the world. It follows then, that both Betty and Rita, the dream versions of the more fraught and complicated Diane and Camilla, each seem to slot into an old-fashioned Hollywood archetype: Betty is the naive blonde ingenue, while Rita is the mysterious femme fatale. And yet in the film’s final third, these tropes are turned upside down: it’s Diane, with her murderous intentions, who has acted out the part of the villainess.

What happens in the car crash?

We first meet Rita when she is sitting in the back of a limo, and is surprised when the driver pulls over at an unexpected stop along Mulholland Drive, up in the Hollywood Hills. A man in the front of the car pulls out a gun, and it seems that he is about to shoot her - perhaps foreshadowing Camilla’s actual death offscreen at the hands of the hitman - when two open-topped cars come careering into the limo.

As the only survivor of the collision, she makes her way down into a residential area of the city and sneaks into an apartment. Later, aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives at the house, which belongs to her Aunt Ruth. After seeing a film poster for Rita Hayworth’s Gilda, the other woman introduces herself using the actress’s name.

If you see the first two hours of the film as a dream sequence, these early events are later reflected in reality. The site of the car crash on Mulholland Drive is now a cut-through to director Adam’s house, where Diane will feel humiliated at his and Camilla’s engagement party, an incident that will eventually push her over the edge and prompt her to arrange the hit. In both stories, then, it’s the site of a traumatic event.

Who is the hitman?

In the film’s first section, Joe (Mark Pellegrino) is a clumsy hitman who messes up an attempt to steal a little black book, killing not only the target but a woman in the next room, and the janitor who witnesses the murder, before triggering the fire alarm. It’s a darkly comic sequence where the slapstick humour sits unsettlingly alongside the spate of killings.

In reality, Joe still is a hitman, but a competent one hired by Diane to kill her former lover; once he has done so, he presents her with the blue key. In Diane’s dream, then, it’s as if she has tried to neutralise the threat - and assuage her guilt - by transforming a ruthless killer into a bumbling mess who can barely do his job. Perhaps her subconscious is trying to persuade her that he might not be able to kill Camilla after all.

Who is the ‘monster’ behind the Winkie’s?

Towards the beginning of the film, a man named Dan, who is sitting in a Winkie’s diner, explains that he had a nightmare where he saw a terrifying figure behind the same restaurant. When he checks around the back, the strange man appears, causing him (and probably viewers of a nervous disposition) to collapse in fright.

The same man appears again towards the close of the film: the first time, he is holding the blue box, the second, his face is superimposed on top of those of Betty and Rita’s, which appear over a view of Los Angeles. Winkie’s diner is the place where Diane meets up with the hitman who will kill Camilla, so it’s possible that this monster is the manifestation of her worst impulses. Just as Dan is unable to bear the horrific sight, Diane is ultimately unable to come to terms with where her dark side has led her.

Who are the old couple - and what do they mean in the film?

We first meet Betty when she emerges from LAX airport, accompanied by an old lady, who we soon learn is named Irene, and an elderly man. The pair reiterate how nice it was to travel with Betty, and wish her well in her attempts to crack Hollywood, promising to watch out for her “on the big screen”. It seems like a sweet farewell, but this is a Lynch movie, and the tone quickly changes when the old couple climb into the back of a taxi. As they travel away from the airport, at first they appear to be smiling sweetly, but they hold their expressions far too long, and their grins become unsettlingly rictus.

It’s an early hint towards the terrifying role the pair will play at the end of the film. Once Diane wakes up from her dream, leaving her Betty persona behind, she sees the blue key from the hitman, telling her that the hit has successfully been carried out on Camilla. Horrified at her actions, Diane is beset by hallucinations and sees a miniature version of the old couple creeping under her door, as her apartment fills with the sound of hysterical laughter.

The old couple soon switch to their original size and pursue Diane, their grins becoming even more horrifying and strange. Though before they encouraged her naive aspirations of stardom, now they remind her of everything she hasn’t achieved, and are almost mocking with their empty smiles; her early dream has become sinister and curdled.

What happens at the end of Mulholland Drive?

Cornered by the vision of the old couple, Diane reaches into a drawer to pull out a gun, then shoots herself.

After Diane dies and everything fades to black, we see her and Camilla’s - or should that be Betty and Rita’s? - smiling faces superimposed over the bright lights of Los Angeles. It’s reminiscent of an old-fashioned movie poster, as if Diane has finally been given the star treatment, but soon the two women are joined by the face of the creature from behind Winkie’s — Diane’s final dream doesn’t last for long before something more nightmarish settles in as a reminder of what she has done.

Then we return to the club from earlier in the film, where a blue-haired woman, who had previously appeared in the audience, whispers “silencio”, as if she is finally putting Diane to rest. Just as the main dream sequence came to an end after the women visited Club Silencio, unravelling their illusions and bringing them back to reality, now the club acts as the final bookend for the second section of the story, with Diane’s self-delusions finally over.

Visit our Movies hub for the latest news and features, or find something to watch tonight with our TV Guide .

The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.

A double-page spread from Radio Times magazine, featuring the best programmes to watch this week

Subscribe to Radio Times

Try 10 issues for just £10!

Holiday brochures 2025/2026

Request a free holiday brochure to give you inspiration for your next trip whether that be a river cruise, city break, escorted tour, safari we have the right holiday for you.

Could you get more from your pension?

Find out if you could get up to 30% more from your pension income* Calculate how much more income you could get by using our online annuity calculator.

The best TV and entertainment news in your inbox

an image, when javascript is unavailable

Mulholland Drive

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

A moronic and incoherent piece of garbage. — The New York Observer

“. . . Makes a severe and unwelcome turn down a lost highway.”— Variety

“Exactly what the hell happens in this movie?” — Premiere

Silencio. That’s the last word uttered in the mind teaser — some would say mind fuck — that is David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive , but nobody who sees it is going to shut up about it. Even the critics who don’t throw stones feel the need to pull out fancy words like doppelg”nger and inchoate and oneiric to elucidate the meaning of Lynch’s surreal dreamscape. Come on, that’s almost as bad as the Web fan-boys who only salivate when co-stars Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring strip down and rub titties.

Before reducing Mulholland Drive to hot lesbo action or a Freudian exercise, let the movie pull you in. Surrender to it. Lynch’s wild ride through the unconscious is grounded in emotion — perhaps a result of 1999’s atypically benign The Straight Story — and minus the cold posturing that undercut 1997’s Lost Highway .

Following his film Blue Velvet in 1986 and the groundbreaking Twin Peaks TV series in 1990, Mulholland Drive makes movies feel alive again. This sinful pleasure is a fresh triumph for Lynch, and one of the best films of a sorry-ass year. For visionary daring, swooning eroticism and colors that pop like a whore’s lip gloss, there’s nothing like this baby anywhere.

That’s the problem. The film was first intended as a TV series, but frightened execs at ABC dropped Lynch’s 1999 pilot, with Fox and the usually adventurous HBO following suit. It took an additional $7 million in financing (France’s StudioCanal ponied up) for Lynch to reconceive the $8 million pilot as a feature. Remnants of the pilot remain, including Robert Forster doing a quick vanishing act as a detective. No matter. Mulholland Drive is all of a dark, dazzling piece, and lapses in clarity seem a small price to pay for breathtaking images like these.

Editor’s picks

The 100 best tv episodes of all time, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, 25 most influential creators of 2024.

After the credits roll over a brassy jitterbug contest, Mulholland Drive opens in a fever dream, with a woman twisting and turning in bed. Then it’s dark — Lynch dark, an inky black accentuated by Angelo Badalamenti’s seductively unsettling score (no sound design this year is more vital to a film’s success). It’s night in Los Angeles. A limo slithers along Mulholland Drive, but just as the driver stops to shoot the gorgeous brunette (Harring) in the back seat, the limo is rammed by a carload of hard-partying teens. The only survivor is the brunette, who staggers in heels down a hill, taking refuge in a Hollywood bungalow just vacated by a woman on her way out of town.

Cut to the L.A. airport. Bright sunshine. Perky blonde Betty Elms (Watts) has just jetted in from Deep River, Ontario, to make it as an actress. An elderly couple she met on the plane wish her well. Sitcom stuff? Hardly. Those seniors give off a malevolent vibe, especially when they laugh. Lynch includes a shot of the pair, grinning at the camera, that creeped me out big-time.

A feeling of dread infects everything except Betty, who keeps smiling even when she settles into her aunt’s bungalow and finds the brunette in the shower. Yes, that bungalow. Instead of reporting the naked stranger to the apartment manager (veteran Ann Miller in a frisky cameo), Betty offers to help. The brunette calls herself Rita, after Rita Hayworth (she spots a poster of the 1940s star in Gilda hanging on the wall), but the limo accident has erased her memory of everything, notably where she got the cash stuffed in her purse.

When the name Diane Selwyn triggers a response in Rita, the girls play detective (Lynch’s Angels?) and turn up no end of surprises, including a mysterious blue box and key, a dwarfish tycoon (Michael J. Anderson) with ties to Hollywood, a mobster (composer Badalamenti doubling as an actor) who doesn’t suffer bad espresso gladly, a bungling hit man (Mark Pellegrino), a threatening cowboy (Layfayette Montgomery), a crazed psychic (Lee Grant) and — oh, yes — a rotting corpse.

That’s enough setups for a full TV season, and I haven’t mentioned Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), a hotshot director who passes up Betty for the lead in his movie because the mob has ordered him to audition a mystery woman named Camilla Rhodes and shout out, “This is the girl!” Lynch likes sticking it to Hollywood, sometimes too much. There are times when you wonder if Lynch knows where he’s going, such as the scene in which Adam catches his wife in bed with the gardener (Billy Ray Cyrus, of all people) and retaliates by smearing her jewelry with pink paint. But each vignette adds to the unease that envelops Betty and Rita. One, about a man who dreams of something terrible lurking behind the diner where the girls eat, has a shuddering impact.

Anker's Soundcore Earbuds Pack 30 Hours of Battery Life — And They're on Sale for Just $20

Here's how to watch 'snl' online without cable, cedric the entertainer talks debut novel 'flipping boxcars' and getting into the bbq business.

The relatively unknown Watts and Harring are sensational in ways that go beyond the call of babes-in-distress duty. Harring, of the TV soap Sunset Beach, makes Rita a ravishing blank slate on which Betty draws her fantasies. And Watts, born in England and raised in Australia, is a revelation. Her performance, nailing every subversive impulse under Betty’s sunny exterior, ranks with the year’s finest. Watch her in the audition scene — as perversely brilliant as anything Lynch has ever directed — when Betty reads lines with Jimmy Katz, an older actor smarmed to perfection by Chad Everett. Earlier, with Rita, Betty had rehearsed the role of a good girl who is being sexually abused by her father’s business partner. But with Jimmy, Betty assertively takes charge, breathing in his ear, biting his lip, reading her dialogue — “Get out of here before I kill you” — like a carnal invitation.

Childless GOP Candidate Borrows Friend’s Wife and Kids for Photo Ops

As death rate surges, texas asks supreme court to let it keep denying care to pregnant women, sean combs' history of controversies and allegations, billy joel announces 2025 us stadium concerts with sting, stevie nicks.

As Watts digs into the juiciest role for a young actress in ages, Lynch starts unveiling the method behind his madness. When Betty invites Rita to share her bed, their give-and-take is richly comic: “Have you done this before?” asks Betty. “I don’t know,” says the amnesiac. Later, Rita whisks Betty off to a decaying nightclub; no one does glamorous old-Hollywood rot like Lynch. Zombified musicians perform without benefit of orchestra. “No hay banda,” says the sleazy MC (Geno Silva). He intros a singer (Rebekah Del Rio) who breaks into a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” that brings tears to Betty and Rita (Rita is wearing a blond wig now, shades of Hitchcock’s Vertigo). To add to the symbolism overload, the singer collapses midsong, though her voice goes on, and a blue-haired la dy at the club whispers, “Silencio.” Whew! You can do one of two things: Scratch your head and curse Lynch as a freak or realize that what’s transpired so far is the dream being experienced by the woman from the first scene, a woman who might be Betty.

Might is the operative word. In the film’s final third, as identities shift and the world is thrown out of balance, we are encouraged to link the pieces of the puzzle cunningly devised by Lynch, cinematographer Peter Deming, production designer Jack Fisk and editor Mary Sweeney. The challenge is exhilarating. You can discover a lot about yourself by getting lost in Mulholland Drive . It grips you like a dream that won’t let go.

Remembering Maggie Smith: A Generation's Beloved and Terrifying Grandmother

Appreciation
By David Mack

Daniel Radcliffe Praises Maggie Smith's 'Fierce Intellect' in Tribute

Remembering a Great
By Tomás Mier

King Charles, Paul McCartney, Viola Davis, More Pay Tribute to Maggie Smith: 'A National Treasure'

Rest in Peace

'My Old Ass': What Do You Tell Your Younger Self? And What If You Grow Up to Be Aubrey Plaza?

MOVIE REVIEW
By David Fear

Maggie Smith, Renowned Actress of 'Downton Abbey' and 'Harry Potter,' Dead at 89

By Daniel Kreps

Most Popular

50 cent sets diddy abuse allegations docuseries at netflix: 'it's a complex narrative spanning decades' (exclusive), al b. sure calls for an investigation into death of diddy’s ex kim porter , archaeologists solve mystery behind black tombstone found in jamestown carrying an english knight, suge knight claims jay-z, dr. dre, and other industry people were privy to diddy's alleged criminal activity, you might also like, kanye west announces new album ‘bully,’ debuts song ‘beauty and the beast’ at listening event in china, inside victoria beckham’s château show with eva longoria, sofia vegara, and helena christensen, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, why has ‘industry’ season 3 been so good its creators needed two seasons to learn their craft, randy orton tattoos in wwe 2k raise copyright concerns.

🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!

Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!

Get us in your inbox

By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.

Awesome, you're subscribed!

The best things in life are free.

Déjà vu! We already have this email. Try another?

Love the mag?

Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to your inbox. Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions.

Things to Do
Food & Drink
Arts & Culture
Time Out Market
Coca-Cola Foodmarks
Los Angeles

Recommended

Mulholland Dr.

David Lynch's rambling LA thriller returns to its true home on the big screen

Time Out says

Style conquers soul in David Lynch’s celebrated 2001 Hollywood noir, a dusky, discursive thriller as glamorous and slippery as the city it celebrates. Famously, it was shot as a television pilot, following two women – dark, troubled Rita (Laura Harring) and bright-as-a-button Betty (Naomi Watts, remarkable) – as they navigate the glittering cinematic surface and the criminal underbelly of LA, encountering budding director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) en route. But the show never made it to air, so Lynch took the footage and built around it, adding a bruising anti-romantic climax and leaving plenty of threads hanging.

Gleefully trashing traditional narrative, the result is peppered with moments of pure, neck-prickling sensation – the stark horror of the ‘creature behind Winkie’s’, the aching, inexplicable sadness of the Silencio nightclub. But unusually for Lynch, the emotional centre remains elusive: the relationship between Betty and Rita is remote, even prurient, while Adam’s scenes are amusing but lead nowhere. Visually it’s a wonder, lavishly stocked with deep shadows and crimson lips, while the mood of elegant despair is flawlessly maintained. But there’s not enough heart here to match the operatic, empathetic intensity of Lynch’s best work.

Release Details

Release date: Friday 14 April 2017
Duration: 146 mins

Cast and crew

Director: David Lynch
Screenwriter: David Lynch
Justin Theroux
Chad Everett
Robert Forster
Brent Briscoe
Katharine Towne
Mark Pellegrino
Laura Elena Harring
Naomi Watts

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

Discover Time Out original video

Press office
Investor relations
Work for Time Out
Editorial guidelines
Privacy notice
Do not sell my information
Cookie policy
Accessibility statement
Terms of use
Modern slavery statement
Manage cookies
Advertising

Time Out Worldwide

All Time Out Locations
North America
South America
South Pacific

8 Reasons Why “Mulholland Drive” Is A Masterpiece of American Cinema

Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s 2001, puzzling neo noir mystery-drama recently topped BBC Culture’s poll of the 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films. It was a resounding triumph for the film because the poll asked 177 film critics from 36 countries to name their favourite films of the last 16 years.

Despite beating the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Wong Kar-wai’s, In the Mood for Love and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the result came as a surprise to few as Mulholland Drive has been the darling of film critics since its release and often features in lists of the greatest films of all time.

This list will look to explain exactly why, despite many able contenders, Mulholland Drive deserves to top BBC Culture’s poll and why it is a masterpiece of American cinema.

1. Lynch manipulates our expectations like other directors manipulate lighting

The expectations he plays with have been forged from the language of film that audiences have developed over time. An example of this is when the camera zooms in on Naomi Watts’ character’s face when she first sees Justin Theroux’s character which tells the audience that this is love at first sight or at least suggests an infatuation that will result in Theroux’s character casting her in his film.

However, this is not how the scene plays out and this is one of a litany of examples where Lynch can be seen to be setting up expectations only to completely deceive, all the while making you believe the artifice that has been presented to you.

To continue to do this repeatedly for the entire length of the film is quite an achievement but every time the rug is pulled out from underneath, the audience is also left dangling which allows them to fully engage with the terrifying nothingness that is at the heart of the film.

2. The film’s capacity for ideas is endless

It inspires countless possible explanations as to what the film is about; is the story non-linear? Is it a dream? Is it partially a dream and partially a nightmare? Is it a collective dream? If it is all a product of Naomi Watts’ character’s subconscious then whose point of view do we inhibit after the character is dead? Is it still a manifestation of the dead character’s subconscious until the brain finally shuts down? Who is the cowboy?

Lynch does not offer a definitive answer to any of these questions and the film can be commended for the amount of questions it leaves the audience demanding answers to. However, screenwriters will tell you that it should be possible to explain a film in one word and if nothingness is the word that explains Mulholland Drive then perhaps expecting answers suggests an optimism you shouldn’t be bringing with you to the film.

3. The film is a ‘poisoned valentine’. Despite the film’s homages to past films, it is a critique of Hollywood, the market forces that dictate it and the medium of cinema in general

The film is a very deliberate satire of Hollywood and one of the best examples of such, certainly since Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (A film that Lynch has admitted is one of his favourite films from the classical Hollywood period). And just like Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive is much more about the hegemonic power of Hollywood and its poisonous underbelly as it is about the allure of tinsel town.

The film affectionately recreates the fantastical Hollywood that is often presented in film, infusing it with a melodramatic dream-like quality and inserting references to past Hollywood films.

However, the films ultimate rejection of everything expected of American cinema is a commentary on the evils that underlie the film industry and particularly what it does to those, like Watts’ character, who dare to dream about working in the business.

4. The film champions the spirit of independent cinema

The championing of the nebulous spirit of independent cinema is a theme that has been apparent in much of Lynch’s work but is perhaps most apparent in Mulholland Drive due to the film being a ‘poisoned valentine’ to Hollywood.

This rejection of Hollywood is rather fitting because independent cinema is defined much more by what it is not, than what it is. Mulholland Drive is aware of this as Lynch can be seen to use traditional Hollywood tropes, only to subvert them later to make the rejection of classical Hollywood more striking.

An analysis of the film’s narrative further positions Mulholland Drive as being a champion of American independent cinema as the fact that the film is virtually impossible to understand on first viewing is perhaps more anathematic than anything to dominant Hollywood cinema and the capitalist ideology it is implicit in. Lynch’s decision to center the film on a lesbian relationship also has a radical potential as traditionally it has largely been left to American independent cinema to deal with LGBT issues.

Screen Rant

Mulholland drive ending, explained.

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Happy Gilmore 2 Adds Popular Wrestling Star To The Cast Of The Adam Sandler Sequel

Peter pan's neverland nightmare release window confirmed by director & producer of twisted childhood universe, box office: beetlejuice 2 on track for huge milestone, wild robot defeats francis ford coppola's $120m epic.

Content Warning: this article contains discussions of suicide and depression.

The jaw-dropping ending of Mulholland Drive delivers more questions than answers, but it's a fascinating study of the psychology behind dreams. David Lynch's 2001 film follows two strange women who cross paths in Hollywood: one is an aspiring actress full of dreams and promises, and the other has just barely escaped a lethal car crash and lost all her memory. Together they uncover the ugly truth about the beauty and fame that surrounds them and develop a romance capable of altering reality.

David Lynch's surrealist storytelling comes in handy since the majority of the movie takes place inside a dream. Mulholland Drive is a thriller at its core but often flirts with horror elements and offers an absorbing romance that feels like a dangerous game, establishing a distinctive neo-noir atmosphere. With its nonlinear narrative and its vast array of characters, Mulholland Drive is often regarded as one of the most confusing yet still brilliant movies ever.

Related: Every David Lynch Movie, Ranked By Their Weirdness

What Happens In Mulholland Drive's Ending

Mulholland Drive takes a puzzling turn in its final minutes, deconstructing everything it has built so far. Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) disappear, and now the story revolves around Diane Selwyn, a struggling actress who looks exactly like Betty. She wakes up in the same apartment where Betty and Rita found the dead woman, and she reminisces about her deteriorating affair with a successful movie star, Camilla Rhodes, who looks just like Rita. Diane attends a party hosted by Adam (Justin Theroux), now a strong-willed and talented director, where multiple characters who appeared earlier in the movie come and go, taking over different roles.

The party turns out to be a horrible experience for Diane, who witnesses her lover, Camilla, embracing a young woman, the previous "Camilla Rhodes" (Melissa George), and Adam hints at Camilla and him getting married. In a nightmarish sequence typical of David Lynch , Diane sees herself surrounded by smiling, prosperous people, and contemplates her misery as she breaks down in tears. She hires a hitman to kill Camilla but seems hesitant about the plan. Later, Diane is tormented by terrifying hallucinations and distraught with guilt for Camilla's murder, reaching out for her gun and shooting herself in the same position the decomposing body of Diane Selwyin was found earlier.

Are Diane & Betty The Same Person?

Laura Harring and Naomi Watts in the Silencio theater in Mulholland Drive

Most of what viewers see in Mulholland Drive is actually a dream that occurs inside Diane's head, where her distressing reality is replaced by fabricated fantasies. In this dream, she becomes Betty, an innocent young actress with a promising future ahead, and Camilla is Rita, a woman who got involved in a car crash and lost all her memories. Diane's dream represents a fresh start, an alternate version where the ugly part of her soul can't interfere.

In one of the many interpretations of Mulholland Drive , Camilla miraculously survives the hit only in the dream and forgets about the life she led before, implying that in Diane's mind, her affair with Camilla only came to a bitter end because she was a failure and Camilla was one of the most successful actresses of Hollywood. Rita is a blank canvas, enabling Betty/Diane to bend her to her will and mold her image into Rita, which explains why Betty and Rita look the same at the end, with the blonde wig. If they blend into each other, there's nothing from the other they could possibly want.

Related: Theory: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive Is A Twin Peaks Movie

The Audition & Theater Scenes Explained

Betty's audition scene is closely related to the scene where Rita and Betty watch a performance at Club Silencio. The audition is such a turning point because it probably represents the moment the real Diane realized her dreams wouldn't come true, unlocking valuable clues about Mulholland Drive ’s true meaning. Immediately after Betty's successful, yet uncomfortable audition, the movie cuts to a wonderful and seemingly natural performance, but as the camera pulls backward, a full studio set is revealed. Betty sees that Adam is blown away by her but chooses Camilla Rhodes’ dream version as the lead actress instead.

Adam clearly only does so because he's dangerously under pressure, connecting to the Club Silencio sequence, in which Lynch highlights to the audience how it's all fiction and why these characters are desperately trying to escape from reality: as the magician (Richard Green) demonstrates how fragile reality is, Betty's world begins to crumble. Her mind blames Hollywood's greedy forces for her shattered dreams, and deep down she thinks Adam chose Camilla over her because he was being coerced by Mr. Roque's (Michael J. Anderson) men. Mr. Roque's imposing figure was created by Diane's troubled subconscious in order to embody the very worst of the film industry.

The Blue Key Explained

The dream version of Joe (Mark Pellegrino), the hitman, is a clumsy man who nearly messes up his mission entirely. The whole office scene in which a simple hit turns into a chaotic chain of events represents Diane's wishes for Camilla's hit to go wrong. Her subconscious makes out Joe as an incompetent killer and lighten the violence that surrounds both his actions and Diane's decision to go through with the hit.

In the cafeteria scene, Diane hires Joe to kill Camilla, and he tells her she'll soon find a blue key indicating the job is complete. While the blue key symbolizes Camilla's death in the real world, the object has a totally different meaning in Diane's dream: the blue key eventually unlocks the reality realm and shatters Diane's dream, turning Mulholland Drive into one of the scariest non-horror movies . The blue box that the key opens might represent Diane's pandora box, which unleashes the evils of her mind in her perfect dream world.

Related: Every Naomi Watts Horror Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

Who Is The Real Villain In Mulholland Drive

The dumpster monster is the key to realizing that Diane is Mulholland Drive 's true villain. When the creature appears later on holding the blue box, one can assume that the monster is the personification of Diane's ugly part. The scene in which the monster first appears is directly linked to Diane ordering Camilla's death, thus the moment the monster was born. Diane becomes increasingly obsessed with Camilla’s success and orders her lover's death out of jealousy. Although Diane succumbs to guilt and clearly suffers from harsh mental conditions, she embraces death as the only way to save her soul, since she isn't able to find comfort in her dreams.

The True Meaning Behind Mulholland Drive's Ending

Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive

In Mulholland Drive 's ambiguous ending , it's funny how much of reality translates into a dream and vice-versa. For example, the cowboy character (Monty Montgomery) tells Adam he'll appear two more times if things go bad, and that's exactly what happens when the truth about Diane begins to unfold: although he's just a random guy at a party, he breaks into Diane's subconscious as a bad omen. Names also play their part, since "Betty" comes from a waitress Diane sees. Moreover, the man she casually crosses eyes with at the cafeteria is the guy from the monster scene, representing a turning point in her life: the deal with the hitman.

Although Mulholland Drive 's weird and polarizing nature offers viewers the opportunity to come up with their own conclusions, some easy-to-miss hints and details lead up to a tragic truth. In addition to perfectly capturing the idiosyncrasies of a dream, David Lynch also uses Diane's trajectory to expose the downfall of Hollywood and the film industry, outlining the L.A. scene as simply a game of egos where talented people and their respective dreams are crashed by an oppressive and outdated system. In a way, Mulholland Drive takes the concept of the "American Dream" and dissects it into a myriad of hopeless characters and cardinal sins.

More: Every David Lynch Movie, Ranked By Rewatchability

SR Originals
Mulholland Drive

The 10 Best Movies With Non-Linear Narratives, Ranked

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Back in the days of its inception, cinema was little more than a circus trick. It was through several years and several filmmakers from several countries that the medium evolved into an art form — and not just any art form, but a storytelling one. From that point, the general grammar and syntax of cinematic stories started evolving. Eventually, filmmakers found a new way to tell stories: the non-linear narrative.

While most films follow a specific sequence of events in chronological order, these are movies that throw the laws of time out the window. After all, toying with the progression of time is one of the elements that make cinema unique . Whether they jump between the present and flashbacks, or convey their narrative in reverse-chronological order, or just move between different moments in time, movies with non-linear narratives can be some of the best of all time.

10 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' (2004)

Directed by michel gondry.

Joel and Clementine in bed together in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Every movie fan loves a good romantic film that will make them go to bed with a smile on their faces. However, every now and then, it's good to mix it up by watching an emotional breakup movie that should be enough to leave anyone ugly-crying. For that, there's no better choice than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , about a man who decides to undergo a procedure to erase his ex from his memories after he finds out that she did the same with her memories of him.

Kate Winslet is electrifying, and Jim Carrey delivers one of the best-ever dramatic performances by a comedic actor. But the cast isn't all that Eternal Sunshine has going for it. Michel Gondry 's surrealist, dream-like direction is paired wonderfully with one of Charlie Kaufman 's best scripts, delivering a movie that perfectly captures the elusive nature of memories and the bizarre nature of romantic love.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Not available

9 'Arrival' (2016)

Directed by denis villeneuve.

Aliens Abbott and Costello speaking with Louise (Amy Adams) with vaporous symbols in Arrival

Nowadays, Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has more than cemented his place as one of the best sci-fi directors Hollywood currently has, but that wasn't always the case. He earned that title back in 2016, when he released his first outing in the genre: Arrival . Based on a novella by Ted Chiang , it's about a linguist tasked with leading a team of researchers when mysterious alien spaceships touch down around the globe. With nations on the verge of global war, she must find a way to communicate with these strange visitors.

Sometimes in alien invasion movies, aliens come in peace, and there are very few films in that subgenre as good as Arrival . It has beautiful visuals, a script as moving as it is intellectually provocative, and the way it plays with time toward its third act gives one of the most brilliant ending plot twists 21st-century cinema has seen thus far.

8 'Amores Perros' (2000)

Directed by alejandro g. iñárritu.

One of the main characters of "Amores Perros", sitting on the street with his dogs

4-time Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu is one of the best Mexican filmmakers working in Hollywood today, but back in the early days of his career in his home country, he delivered one of the best feature debuts of any director in history : Amores Perros , a Pulp Fiction -inspired drama that interweaves the stories of an amateur dog trainer, a model, and a derelict hitman as they all find their lives transformed by a car crash in the heart of Mexico City.

Emotionally devastating and capable of keeping tensions high for a whopping 2-and-a-half hours of runtime, Amores Perros finds in dogs a symbol of loyalty, love, and identity. The way the different stories (populated by some truly fascinating characters) interconnect narratively is admirable enough, but the way Iñárritu keeps them bound tightly together thematically is even more worthy of praise.

Amores Perros

Watch on Paramount+

7 'The Killing' (1956)

Directed by stanley kubrick.

Praised by many as the single greatest filmmaker of all time, Stanley Kubrick should need no introduction. But while his best-known masterworks, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Shining , are among the most popular films ever made, there's one gem early in his filmography that deserves a lot more recognition from the general public : The Killing . This heist noir follows a crook as he assembles a team to execute a daring racetrack robbery.

Through its groundbreaking non-linear narrative, The Killing changed both heist films and film noir forever. Its surprisingly steady pacing and tight script, combined with the unique voice that would soon after turn Kubrick into the celebrated master that he's remembered as today, the film proved to be a gargantuan improvement over Kubrick's abysmal early efforts.

The Killing

Watch on MGM+

6 'Mulholland Dr.' (2001)

Directed by david lynch.

Rita and Betty in Mulholland Drive sit next to each other in a theater and look shocked.

As one of the main institutions who defined surrealism in film , the great David Lynch has made many of what arthouse cinema fans would call the best mind-bending movies of all time. His magnum opus is arguably the Oscar-nominated Mulholland Dr. , about a woman who's rendered amnesiac after a crash on Mulholland Drive. She and an aspiring actress search for clues about who she really is across Hollywood, as dreams and reality start crumbling and melding together.

During its first hour or so, Mulholland Dr. may seem like the cheesy work of an amateurish director. It's after Lynch starts to reveal what's behind the curtain that things start coming together and the film's fragmented narrative starts making less and less sense (in a good, traditionally Lynchian way, of course). This is one of those films that one wants to go into as blind as possible, since the many shocks that lie in wait make the experience atmospheric, engrossing, and absolutely unforgettable.

Mulholland Drive

5 'pulp fiction' (1994), directed by quentin tarantino.

Jules aiming a gun at someone off camera in a diner in Pulp Fiction

Following the release of Pulp Fiction in 1994, a wave of films imitating its parallel-storyline structure started to come out — including Iñárritu's Amores Perros . This is one of the most influential of the '90s, and it lives up to its reputation . It's a dark comedy about the lives of two mob hitmen, a boxer, a gangster and his wife, and a pair of diner robbers who intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption.

It's largely thanks to the masterpiece that is Pulp Fiction that Tarantino tends to be recognized as one of the best screenwriters of all time . With a star-studded cast, four equally gripping tales full of Tarantino's idiosyncrasies, and themes of the ambiguity of goodness and the cacophony of fate, the film shows the auteur at the top of his game. It's thrilling, it's dramatic, and it has several of the most iconic scenes in American movie history.

Pulp Fiction

4 'rashomon' (1950), directed by akira kurosawa.

"The Bandit" and "The Woman" look angrily in 'Rashomon'

Akira Kurosawa was not only the greatest Japanese filmmaker who ever lived, but one of the greatest worldwide. A master of his craft, he made numerous revolutionary works of art over the course of his career — among them, the masterful Rashomon . In it, the rape of a bride and the murder of her samurai husband are recounted from the different perspectives of a bandit, a woodcutter, the samurai's ghost, and the bride.

This brilliant crime drama, one of the best arthouse mystery movies of all time , gave birth to the "Rashomon effect", an instance when the same event is recounted in many contradicting ways, used across storytelling media and even in courts. This powerful technique may sound like a gimmick, but Kurosawa's different ways of telling the same story over and over again make for one of the tensest, most philosophically fascinating dramas in the history of cinema .

3 'Memento' (2000)

Directed by christopher nolan.

Leonard Shelby sits starkly shadowed in crisp black and white in Memento.

Though he may be a huge blockbuster director today, Christopher Nolan was once an up-and-coming virtuoso from the indie scene. Since those days, it was evident just how much talent he had in him. After all, it takes a truly special director to make a sophomore film as outstanding as Memento . In it, no one can be trusted . Told in reverse chronological order (with key moments of exposition in regular chronological order interspersed in the narrative), it's the story of Leonard. He's an insurance investigator suffering from short-term memory loss, using notes and tattoos to track down the man who killed his wife, which is the last thing he remembers.

There are some who would go so far as to call Memento its director's best work, and no one would blame them. Its unique sequence of events may be a little disorienting at first, but once one gets the hang of it, it greatly boosts the power of this riveting tale about the lengths people will go to in order to give their lives some semblance of meaning . With a potent Guy Pearce performance in the lead and some of the most brilliant writing and editing in Nolan's filmography, Memento is an all-timer without equal.

2 'Citizen Kane' (1941)

Directed by orson welles.

Charles Foster Kane giving a speech in front of a giant poster of himself in Citizen Kane

Referred to by some as the single greatest American masterpiece cinema has ever seen, Citizen Kane is framed as a reporter's investigation into the life of magnate Charles Foster Kane, in an attempt to unscramble the meaning of his dying words: "Rosebud." It's nearly impossible to believe that this was Orson Welles 's debut, but that it indeed was. Revolutionary then and hyper-influential now, it's a timeless work of art that's sure to remain high on its pedestal for as long as this beautiful medium exists.

Welles is next to flawless in his triple-threat role as star, writer, and director , delivering the most structurally, thematically, and aesthetically perfect character study that one could imagine. As one of the few 1940s films that are genuinely without fault from start to finish, it's a masterclass in how a story told out of sequential order results in an even more hard-hitting experience than it could have ever been otherwise.

Citizen Kane

1 'the godfather part ii' (1974), directed by francis ford coppola.

When it comes to the best movies with non-linear narratives, it's impossible to beat what's easily not just the greatest movie sequel ever made , but perhaps even the single best American film of all time. Of course, it's Francis Ford Coppola 's The Godfather Part II , which mirrors the story of Vito Corleone's ascent to power with that of his son, Michael's, financial expansion and spiritual downfall.

Chief among films with parallel narratives , Godfather II has the perfect balance between flashbacks and present events, its juxtaposition between young Vito and Michael's stories bolstering this crime epic's themes greatly. Beautifully written, technically faultless, and with an impressive cast giving some of the best work of their careers, this incredible character study is the greatest of all time — in no small measure thanks to how it handles its non-linear narrative.

The Godfather: Part II

NEXT: The Best Movie Sequels of All Time, Ranked

IMAGES

Mulholland Drive movie review (2001)
Why David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive Is the Best Movie of the Century
Mulholland Dr. movie review & film summary (2001)
Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Mulholland Drive (2001)

VIDEO

Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive Trailer
MULHOLLAND DRIVE "Diner" Clip + Trailer (2001) David Lynch
Mulholland Drive / 2001 / David Lynch
Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive

COMMENTS

Mulholland Drive movie review (2001)
The movie is hypnotic; we're drawn along as if one thing leads to another-but nothing leads anywhere, and that's even before the characters start to fracture and recombine like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope. "Mulholland Drive" isn't like " Memento," where if you watch it closely enough, you can hope to explain the mystery.
Mulholland Dr.
Rated 4/5 Stars • Rated 4 out of 5 stars 09/10/24 Full Review Mason M Often considered one of the greatest films of all time, Mulholland Drive is an undeniably good film. A beautiful analysis of ...
A twisted road through a landscape of dreams
Conventional movie cops turn up, investigate, and disappear for the rest of the film. Betty discovers the woman from Mulholland taking a shower in her aunt's apartment and demands to know who she is. The woman sees a poster of Rita Hayworth in "Gilda" on the wall and replies, "Rita.". She claims to have amnesia.
Why Mulholland Drive is the greatest film since 2000
Mulholland Drive's own troubled history, and the studio politics and power plays depicted by Lynch in the film itself, hardly feel like coincidences. Under its dream-like veneer, Mulholland ...
Mulholland Drive (film)
Mulholland Drive (stylized as Mulholland Dr.) is a 2001 surrealist mystery film written and directed by David Lynch, and starring Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Ann Miller, and Robert Forster.It tells the story of an aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Watts), newly arrived in Los Angeles, who meets and befriends an amnesiac woman (Harring) recovering from a car accident.
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Mulholland Drive: Directed by David Lynch. With Naomi Watts, Jeanne Bates, Dan Birnbaum, Laura Harring. After a car wreck on Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesiac, she and a Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.
Mulholland Drive (2001)
gigan-92 3 December 2011. Mulholland Drive ( David Lynch, 2001), one of the most ambiguous films to be unleashed upon contemporary audiences, dare one say "abstract" even. In an era where simplicity is preferred over mystery and intrigue, the average audience member may find such a film angering in all respects.
Mulholland Dr.
Mulholland Drive is a puzzle without the courtesy of hinting how the picture is supposed to look when assembled. That's a blessing in this movie year, to find a piece of work both frustrating and ...
Mulholland Dr. Reviews
Mulholland Dr. Reviews - Metacritic. Summary In this complex tale of suspense, set in the unreal universe of Los Angeles, writer/director David Lynch explores the city's schizophrenic nature, an uneasy blend of innocence and corruption, love and loneliness, beauty and depravity. [Universal Focus] Drama. Mystery. Thriller. Directed By: David Lynch.
Mulholland Drive Review
15. Original Title: Mulholland Drive. For some, The Straight Story was evidence that David Lynch was at last emerging from the twisted obsessions of his oeuvre thus far. The director's elegiac ode ...
Twenty Reasons to Love 'Mulholland Drive,' 20 Years Later
Twenty years after the release of the director's gloriously specific and frustrating masterpiece, it stands as an unparalleled, idiosyncratic work of cinema. By Adam Nayman Oct 19, 2021, 8:17am ...
FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Hollywood, A Funhouse Of Fantasy
''Mulholland Drive,'' which the New York Film Festival is showing tonight and tomorrow afternoon at Alice Tully Hall (it opens commercially on Monday), is a fascinating example of how a great film ...
Mulholland Drive Movie Review
January 23, 2019. age 14+. His best. It's not that terrible content wise, so long as your kid understands sex. It's mostly just a slow-burning thinkers movie, so it's not for the impatient. It has some romance scenes between two women, nudity shown. However these scenes are vital to the plot and extremely romantic, not a bad thing at all.
Mulholland Drive Explained
'Mulholland Dr.', quite simply, offers the greatest cinematic mystery of all time. In this article, we try to explain the major questions that you might have had and its various interpretations. Now, at its surface and stripping the film down to the most banal meaning, 'Mulholland Dr.' is a movie about a struggling Hollywood actress ...
Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive started life as a pilot for a TV series. When ABC rejected it outright, Lynch elected to shoot a series of new, lurid scenes to provide an ending of sorts. Watching the final project, it's easy to determine where this "break" occurs. The first 105 minutes of this movie are engrossing, and, for the most part, intelligible.
Mulholland Drive explained: A guide to David Lynch's movie
Set in motion by a car crash on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, Lynch's 2001 film stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in dual roles, with a cast that also includes Justin Theroux.
Mulholland Drive
A limo slithers along Mulholland Drive, but just as the driver stops to shoot the gorgeous brunette (Harring) in the back seat, the limo is rammed by a carload of hard-partying teens. The only ...
Mulholland Dr. 2001, directed by David Lynch
But unusually for Lynch, the emotional centre remains elusive: the relationship between Betty and Rita is remote, even prurient, while Adam's scenes are amusing but lead nowhere. Visually it's ...
8 Reasons Why "Mulholland Drive" Is A Masterpiece of American Cinema
Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's 2001, puzzling neo noir mystery-drama recently topped BBC Culture's poll of the 21st Century's 100 Greatest Films. It was a resounding triumph for the film because the poll asked 177 film critics from 36 countries to name their favourite films of the last 16 years.
Mulholland Drive Ending, Explained
The jaw-dropping ending of Mulholland Drive delivers more questions than answers, but it's a fascinating study of the psychology behind dreams. David Lynch's 2001 film follows two strange women who cross paths in Hollywood: one is an aspiring actress full of dreams and promises, and the other has just barely escaped a lethal car crash and lost all her memory.
10 Best Movies With Non-Linear Narratives, Ranked
His magnum opus is arguably the Oscar-nominated Mulholland Dr., about a woman who's rendered amnesiac after a crash on Mulholland Drive. She and an aspiring actress search for clues about who she ...
Mulholland Drive (film)
Mulholland Drive est un film à énigme néo-noir américano-français écrit et réalisé par David Lynch et sorti en 2001.Il raconte l'histoire de Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), aspirante actrice fraîchement arrivée à Los Angeles, qui se lie d'amitié avec une femme amnésique (Laura Harring) rescapée d'un accident grâce auquel elle a échappé à un meurtre.

A twisted road through a landscape of dreams

Roger Ebert

Mulholland Dr.

Leave a comment

Devara: Part 1

Will & Harper

Amber Alert

The Universal Theory

I, The Executioner

The Apprentice

Daddy’s Head

Latest articles

A Careful Performer: Maggie Smith (1934-2024)

Home Entertainment Guide: September 2024

New York Film Festival 2024: Preview and Thoughts on “The Brutalist,” “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”

The Registers of Fear: Samara Weaving on “Azrael”

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Did You Know?

Photo & Video

Related Items

Recently Viewed

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Mulholland Dr. Reviews

Mulholland Drive Review

Related Articles

Cookie banner

Follow The Ringer online:

Site search

‘Mulholland Drive’ Is Still David Lynch’s Crowning Achievement

Share this story

Share All sharing options for: ‘Mulholland Drive’ Is Still David Lynch’s Crowning Achievement

It’s Not TV

It’s a Highlight Reel

It’s … Robert Forster?

It’s Naomi Watts!

It’s a Throwback

It’s a Horror Movie

It’s Billy Ray Cyrus?!

It’s Satire

It’s Frustrating (in a Good Way!)

It’s Naomi Watts! Part 2

It’s a Musical

It’s Softcore

It’s a Musical, Part 2

It’s a Puzzle

It’s a Wake-up Call

It’s a Remake of The Wizard of Oz

It’s Devastating

It’s Too Good for the Oscars

It’s Endlessly Rewatchable

It’s an All-Timer

Next Up In Movies

Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter

The Karl-Anthony Towns Trade Could Haunt the Knicks and Wolves

KNICKS TRADE FOR KAT

‘The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom’ Reactions

Arsenal Has Embraced Winning Ugly. They’ll Need to Do More to Win the Title.

Georgia-Bama Preview and the Top Tier of CFB With Bruce Feldman, Derrick Rose Retires, Plus Gordon Hayward Stops By

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW; Hollywood, A Funhouse Of Fantasy

Or browse by category:

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Common Sense Selections for Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

How to Share Screen Time Rules with Relatives, Babysitters, and Other Caregivers

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations