mulholland dr movie review

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.

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Mulholland Drive

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. 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. 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.

• David Lynch
• Naomi Watts
• Laura Harring
• Justin Theroux
• 2.2K User reviews
• 257 Critic reviews
• 87 Metascore
• 50 wins & 61 nominations total

Top cast 81

• Betty Elms …

• (as Laura Elena Harring)

• Irene's Companion
• Limo Driver
• (as Scott Wulff)

• Detective McKnight

• Detective Domgaard

• Roque's Manservant
• Back of Head Man
• Hairy-Armed Man

• Cab Driver at LAX
• (as Sean E. Markland)

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The set of reels that was distributed to the movie theaters included a computer-written, photocopied note from director David Lynch himself giving special instructions to the projectionists worldwide. Specifically, he did not want the film to be centered vertically on the screen, but rather to "allow more overhead" as the term in projectionist's slang, that is, to let the top part of the frame be more visible than the bottom part. This was because the film was originally made for TV, with an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 (or 16:9) in mind -- without the projectionists' manual correction, the aspect ratio of the theatrical release (1.85:1) would have resulted in heads being cut off at the top of the silver screen. Lynch also asked to raise the volume of the theater's sound system by three decibels when the film was playing. The note ended with the words, "Your friend, David Lynch."
• Goofs When Betty and Rita are rehearsing for Betty's audition, Rita can be seen reading from a script with lines for "Betty" and "Rita." However, due to the dream logic of the film, this may be interpreted as a clue to what is really going on.

Cowboy : When you see the girl in the picture that was shown to you earlier today, you will say, "this is the girl". The rest of the cast can stay, that's up to you. But the choice for that lead girl is NOT up to you. Now... you will see me one more time, if you do good. You will see me... two more times, if you do bad. Good night.

• Crazy credits Credits have the movie director's name as 'Bob Booker' (not 'Brooker' as we hear). Furthermore, many of the characters' names are simply not mentioned at all during the course of the film (Billy Deznutz, Joe Messing, Bondar, etc.) but their character's names are all listed in the closing credits.
• An additional scene of the detectives McKnight and Domgaard in the police station talking about the car crash the previous night on Mulholland Drive.
• A full scene of dialog with the hit man Joe and the pimp Billy in Pinky's Hot Dog stand with Joe asking about information on the missing woman and about the hot dogs served while the drugged out streetwalker Laney looks on.
• A scene of the Castigliane limo arriving outside Adam Kesher's house where the goon, Kenny, gets out and talks briefly with Taka, the Japanese gardener in the driveway asking if he has seen Adam recently.
• A scene of Betty arriving on the studio lot and meeting Martha Johnson outside the producer's office and Wally coming out the front door to meet her and take her inside.
• An extended scene showing the introduction of Mr. Roque of Vincent Darby entering a large office building and taking an elevator to one of the top floors and asking the receptionist if he could enter Mr. Roque's office.
• During the scene where Mr. Roque relays the message 'the girl is still missing' to various unseen associates, when the unseen man with the hairy arm on the yellow telephone rings his contact, the original scene was not of a telephone under a lamp with a red shade, but a white speaker phone on a bright blue table and a woman's hand (Camila Rhodes?) answering it, but cutting away before she says anything.
• The scene of Adam meeting with the executives is longer with him first arriving holding a iron golf club demanding why he has been called away from the golf course to this meeting and Ray giving him a vague explanation to the movie he's filming. The scene ends with the Castigliane brothers leaving first and Adam yelling at the executives over them rigging the casting of the lead actress and about the film being kept locked up in the studio safe.
• A bit scene where after the bruiser Kenny knocks unconscious Adam's wife and the pool man, he walks around Adam's house and sees Adam's wife's jewelry in the kitchen sink which is overflowing with water. Kenny then is shown breaking all of Adam's golf clubs as payback for trashing the limo and then leaves telling the gangsters in the back of the limo that Adam's not home.
• There is another scene introducing Wilkins (Scott Coffee) who lives in a studio loft above Betty Elms's apartment where Adam phones him just before his meeting with the Cowboy and telling Wilkins about finding his wife in bed with the pool man, and asks Wilkins if he could come over to stay for a while since he has no money. Wilkins agrees, and after hanging up, he yells at his dog crouched in a corner about relieving himself all over the place.
• Connections Edited into Zaum - Andare a parare: Apparire/sparire, essere/riessere: il trucco dell'anima e i fuochi d'artificio dell'immortalità (2011)
• Soundtracks Sixteen Reasons Written by Doree Post and Bill Post Performed by Connie Stevens Courtesy of Warner Bros. Records Inc. By Arrangement with Warner Special Products

User reviews 2.2K

Possibly lynch's best; brilliant, enigmatic, and masterfully filmed.

• KnightLander
• Jun 20, 2005
• How long is Mulholland Drive? Powered by Alexa
• What actually happens in Mulholland Drive, and when?
• What are the answers to David Lynch's clues?
• Is Diane in "Mulholland Dr." a call girl?
• October 19, 2001 (United States)
• United States
• Sueños, misterios y secretos
• Caesar's Restaurant - 1016 W. El Segundo Boulevard, Gardena, California, USA (Winkies restaurant scenes)
• Les Films Alain Sarde
• Asymmetrical Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $15,000,000 (estimated)
• Oct 14, 2001
• $20,289,986
• Runtime 2 hours 27 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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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

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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

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.

Why Age 18+?

Nudity, explicit lesbian encounter, masturbation, sexual references.

Very strong language.

Drinking and smoking.

A dead body and disturbing images.

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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.

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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.

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