4) Mulholland Drive
In pursuit of the inherently confounding qualities of dreams, plenty of filmmakers have attempted to bottle the dream state feeling as experienced while awake in the most affecting way possible. Few have accomplished this as successfully as David Lynch, and nowhere is his surrealistic style more compellingly at work than in 2001’s Mulholland Drive starring Naomi Watts.
Lynch himself has said that there is a trail a viewer could follow to ‘figure out’ the movie, but as far as I’m concerned, it works much better on an enigmatic, dream-like level. Which is to say I have no idea what it’s about and don’t really care to.
It’s a movie that doesn’t contain a number of OMG moments that are exciting or confusing or whatever, but instead just has a general feel to it that’s somehow unsettling, as though the world depicted is not real, nor meant to be so. The cryptic nature of the whole thing lends itself to a tone of unease, which further reflects the state of mind of the Watts character.
It also produces some haunting images that aren’t eerie in the way horror movie images typically are, but are the type you can’t get out of your mind and give you a feeling of discomfort when you think of them. For me, these consist of the guy sitting under the spotlight in the dark room, and the guy who spits his espresso into a napkin. Good god those freak me out.
