Lost Highway

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

Co-written by Barry Gifford and David Lynch, Lost Highway is a feverish Los Angeles neo-noir of murder, desire, fractured identities, and inexplicable dread. Jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) begin receiving anonymous VHS tapes of their home, each one more disturbing than the last. Then, at a party, a pale stranger (Robert Blake) claims to have met Fred before—and somehow to be inside his house at that very moment.

What follows is pure Lynchian nightmare logic: a murder, a prison cell, an impossible transformation, and a second life involving a young mechanic (Balthazar Getty), a gangster (Robert Loggia), and a woman who looks uncannily familiar.

Dark, seductive, and profoundly disorienting, Lost Highway turns Gifford and Lynch’s shared fascination with doomed lovers, criminal underworlds, and unstable American identities into one of the defining cinematic nightmares of the 1990s.

Part of Barry Gifford: Wild Lives, Lost Highways.