Film / News
Compass Presents stages expanded screenings of David Lynch’s cult thriller Mulholland Drive
Back at the turn of the millennium, David Lynch seemed to have put weirdness behind him with the conventionally structured The Straight Story. But the cult director defied expectations with 2001’s Mulholland Drive, which found him firmly back in Twin Peaks/Lost Highway territory with a murky meditation on identity, murder and the movie industry whose pea-souper of a plot remains infuriatingly elusive. Escaping from a car crash in which the two men about to murder her are themselves killed, amnesia-stricken Rita (Laura Elena Harring) staggers to safety, eventually holing up in an apartment complex where she’s discovered by aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts). Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated storyline, young film director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is having a bad day in Hollywood . . . This being a David Lynch movie, of course, the more you know the less you understand. There are dual identities and that decidedly non-linear structure to deal with, along with all the usual trademarks: sinister four-foot-nothing blokes, surreal cabaret singers, red velvet curtain backdrops and, this time around, a baffling blue box that seems to mark the divide between reality and fantasy.
The film is a long-term favourite among the Bristol-based Compass Presents team, who follow their sell-out Monty Python and the Foley Grail success with immersive, expanded screenings of Lynch’s head-scratcher at the Wardrobe Theatre from May 17-20. So what can the uninitiated expect? In addition to the film, there will be ‘moments of experimental performance’. “Compass invites things strange and uncanny to slip beyond the screen and rub up against you in your theatre seat, bringing the terrifying universe of this most unsettling of films even closer,” they promise.
Go here for tickets and further information.
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Main pic: StudioCanal/Park Circus
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