6 Best David Lynch Movies You Must Watch: Our Favourite Films by the Master of Surreal Cinema

Ah, David Lynch, the master of the bizarre and the surreal. It was a particularly sad week last week for the film world as we lost one of the most interesting, creative and influential auteurs of all time. Lynch’s films are like a haunted dreamscape where logic takes a holiday and absurdity is here to babysit. Let’s take a trip (the fun kind) into six of those weird and (sometimes) wonderful worlds that he created:

Blue Velvet (1986)

Blue Velvet is Lynch’s second Hollywood movie, and followed his infamously divisive adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune before Denis Villeneuve took a crack at it and gave us the Oscar-winner we know today. Blue Velvet starts innocently with a guy finding a severed ear in a field (fortunately not his own), and he is told that the ear has something to do with a nightclub singer named Dorothy. Talk about jumping to conclusions. But as the plot thickens and the story unfolds, we find ourselves deep into a nightmarish underworld of lust, crime, and suspense.

 The milk and honey of “the American dream” becomes the grimy, gritty truth of the “American nightmare.” It's the film that made the idea of "What’s going on behind closed doors" terrifying. Blue Velvet kicked off the '80s indie film explosion and paved the way for the likes of Quentin Tarantino, whose first film Reservoir Dogs elicited comparison with the work of David Lynch by critic John Hartl. Tarantino does have famed dislike for Lynch’s work but that’s a story for another day (or you can just Google it).

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Mulholland Drive is an ever-infamous trip down a cinematic rollercoaster with all the sharp turns and loop-de-loops. Starting as a neo-noir mystery, Mulholland Drive soon becomes like a twisted meditation on identity and the risk-fuelled nature of Hollywood as an amnesiac and a perky blonde actress team up to find clues related to the latter’s recent car accident. Sounds fairly simple right? As my third-grade math teacher often said (and embarrassingly many others after that): “WRONG!”

Mulholland Drive is a film that challenges your perception of reality, with a narrative that slips between dream and nightmare and for that, it’s one of the defining films of the 21st century, influencing the likes of Christopher Nolan and Charlie Kaufman with its non-linear storytelling and blurred lines between what’s real and what’s not.

Eraserhead (1977)

What do you get when you combine industrial noise, a creepy baby, and a bleak industrial landscape? David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead. Presented in grainy black and white, it’s like horror smothered in grease. I don’t know how to describe it. If you’ve seen Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, I guess it’s a bit like that. You’re watching and feel so bewildered that you question what exactly you’re getting from this, but you can’t turn it off because you think that the answer might be just around that corner, reluctant as you may be to go there.

Eraserhead is an utter fever dream, a bizarre and inventive tale of anxiety and fear in a post-industrial world, told through disturbing imagery and unsettlingly ominous sound design. As his debut feature, Eraserhead set the tone for Lynch’s career, offering a template that would later be adopted by the likes of Darren Aronofsky and Lars von Trier.

4. The Elephant Man (1980)

The Elephant Man is perhaps his most grounded work. Based on the true story of John Merrick, an 18^th century English artist with a rare condition that causes overgrowth of body parts. A spectacle of freak shows, he was nicknamed the "elephant man." The film tells a deeply emotional and human story of a man who’s treated differently due to his physical deformities. Lynch brings his signature dark beauty to the tragic tale, turning it into one on the nuances of the human condition.

David Lynch may be known for his weirdness and surrealism but here he showcases his ability to extract humanity from the grotesque. It’s a visually stunning and emotionally raw film- and another in black and white- that shows the power of empathy.
Being one of his most accessible films, The Elephant Man brought Lynch mainstream recognition and multiple Oscar nominations including Best Picture. It also helped redefine what a “biopic” could look like.

Lynch would also go on to direct another biopic, The Straight Story, based on Alvin Straight’s journey across Iowa and Wisconsin on a lawn mower to visit his ailing brother. This is a stand out in Lynch’s filmography being G-rated and released by Disney, but also one of his most acclaimed, and the one that Lynch would refer to as his “most experimental.”

5. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

Twin Peaks is one of the most iconic series of all time and one that always must get a mention when looking back at David Lynch’s career. His prequel film though wasn’t met with quite the same praise or success as its small screen counterpart. In fact, the initial reception to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was largely negative. With New York Times critic Vincent Canby even going as far to say that “it's not the worst movie ever made; it just feels like it."

Over the years however as happens sometimes, views have changed. It is now considered a cult classic, with many even coming to consider it a masterpiece. The film digs deep into the tragic life of Laura Palmer, whose murder sparked the events of the series. It’s a stunningly surreal exploration of trauma, small-town secrets, and the forces that control our fates. It pushed the boundaries of what a mystery-thriller could be and cemented Lynch’s reputation for blending something soap opera-ish with the sinister and the supernatural.

6. Inland Empire (2006)

In a career filled with weird and “wtf is going on” kind of movies, Inland Empire might just be the most wtf-est. When many think of David Lynch and weird movies, they think of Mulholland Drive, as they should, but Inland Empire will have you questioning reality, your very existence, and whether or not you need a nap.

The story follows an actress attempting a comeback as she lands a job on a remake of an unfinished Polish movie believed to have been cursed. She begins an affair with her co-star which incidentally mirrors how their characters act in the show. Inland Empire is a multi-layered and chaotic and I know that I throw out the term “fever dream” a lot but if there is any movie that demands the use of such term, it’s Inland Empire. It’s Lynch’s most abstract and ambitious film and paved the way for filmmakers who wanted to push boundaries and experiment with things that can’t be contained by traditional cinema.

David Lynch’s work is like a labyrinth of weirdness, each film a new twist or turn in a world that feels familiar yet totally alien. Whether you're searching for psychological depth, haunting beauty, or just a good reason to question to have an existential crisis, let the strange worlds of David Lynch sweep you away!