Lost Highway

In the organizer's words:

A jealous jazz saxophonist is said to have cruelly murdered his wife. Convicted, he is sent to prison, where he is plagued by unbearable headaches. Until one morning, a young mechanic sits in his cell in his place, whom the guards are forced to release. He begins an affair with a woman who is a dead ringer for the musician ...

Two decades after his surreal and disturbing debut ERASERHEAD (1977) and then four comparatively conventionally narrated films such as THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980) and BLUE VELVET (1986), David Lynch (1946-2025) returned to his beginnings: to the labyrinthine puzzles between inside and outside, dream and reality, madness and analytical deconstruction and to that border region between avant-garde and popular culture. With LOST HIGHWAY, he undertakes a journey into the uncanny using the means of enigma and horror film.

again radically rejects conventional narrative patterns, irritates us by dissolving concepts of space and time and leaves us with a heavy mental rumbling in our stomachs that literally forces us to confront it. Lynch himself once described his perhaps most radical masterpiece as a "psychogenic fugue".

Part of the FilmGalerie's fall series "IN MEMORIAM. Cinematic flashbacks" from 29.10.-3.12.2025.