Sight and Sound
"...A truly terrifying picture....It works on the evocation of unease through subtle sounds and blaring doom metal..." 09/01/1997 p.48-9USA Today
"...Titillating....Amusing Lynch trademarks abound..." 02/21/1997 p.4D Entertainment Weekly
"...Lynch displays his peerless gift for creeping us out with a minimum of means -- the sheer anticipation of horror..." 02/21/1997 p.103-4 New York Times
"...Coolly ominous....[The film] constructs an intricate puzzle out of dream logic, lurid eroticism, violence, shifting identities and fierce intimations of doom..." 02/21/1997 p.C1 Los Angeles Times
"...Beautifully made....LOST HIGHWAY is best at creating a sense of unease....Lynch has put together some thoroughly spooky situations..." 02/21/1997 p.F10 Uncut
3 stars out of 5 -- "[N]ightmare visionary David Lynch slipped the moorings of conventional narrative altogether..." 03/01/2006 p.132 Chicago Sun-Times 6 of 10
David Lynch's ``Lost Highway'' is like kissing a mirror: You like what you see, but it's not much fun, and kind of cold. It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I've seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it. To try is to miss the point. What you see is all you get...That's not to say it's without interest. Some of the images are effective, the soundtrack is strong and disturbing, and there is a moment that Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of (although Hitchcock would not have preceded or followed it with this film). Hope is constantly fanned back to life throughout the story; we keep thinking maybe Lynch will somehow pull it off, until the shapeless final scenes, when we realize it really is all an empty stylistic facade. This movie is about design, not cinema...I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It's just that I'd like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air. - Roger Ebert
Variety 7 of 10
"Lost Highway" is a mysterious, ultra-Lynchian exercise in Designer Noir. The cult filmmaker's first feature in more than four years sees him traversing familiar roads involving weird crimes, bizarre sex, sometimes freakish characters, societal unease and fully warranted paranoia with characteristic stylistic panache and daring. Although uneven and too deliberately obscure in meaning to be entirely satisfying, result remains sufficiently intriguing and startling to bring many of Lynch's old fans back on board for this careening ride...The narrative strategies of Lynch and co-screenwriter Barry Gifford, who penned the novel "Wild at Heart" that Lynch adapted for his 1990 feature, combine with key casting decisions to create intentional mysteries for which there are no answers...With the exception of the blustery Loggia, performances tend toward the low-key. Getty's relatively uninflected turn as an unexceptional young man led into deep water by a sexpot (virtually an extension of his brief role in "Natural Born Killers") comes off best, as Pullman and Arquette register in just OK fashion...As usual in Lynch's carefully crafted pictures, all technical contributions, notably the artful lensing of Peter Deming and production design by Patricia Norris, are aces. - Todd McCarthy
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