‘And the angels wouldn’t help you. Because they’ve all gone away...’
I think the best way to sum up the work of surrealist filmmaker and auteur David Lynch is that my wife and I initially accidentally watched the deleted scenes from this film (which have been collated and turned into a different ‘film’ of sorts under the title Twin Peaks: Missing Pieces) and neither of us realised that’s what had happened until the credits rolled. Indeed, large parts of this Twin Peaks prequel feel like a random collection of scenes presented out of sequence. And yet, when viewed together as a whole, something quite special begins to take shape…
Charting the tragic last days of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and the murder and subsequent investigation of another young girl a year previous, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me offers no answers to the myriad of questions posed in the original TV series. If anything, the town of Twin Peaks seems more unknowable than ever having viewed this movie.
For the many people out there that aren’t already Lynch converts, there is absolutely nothing here that will change your mind. Fire Walk with Me is packed full of cinematic non-sequiturs, baffling unexplained character beats and incomprehensible plotting. At one point David Bowie shows up speaking in an outrageous accent and then promptly disappears never to be seen again. Kiefer Sutherland and ‘Wicked Game’ singer Chris Isaak open the movie as a pair of detectives before they too leave the party with no explanation. That being said, when Fire Walk with Me is good, it’s really good. Lee puts in a career-defining performance as the doomed Laura Palmer and Ray Wise is sinister and compelling as her possessed father Leyland.
It’s taken me a long time to watch this belated prequel despite the fact that it shows up on many lists of the greatest horror films of all time. In fact, I doubted whether this was a horror film at all. Well, as anyone who has sat through the nightmarish third act of this film will tell you – this is about as horrifying as they come. It’s also shot through with genius. Just don’t ask me to explain what any of it means.