As a reviewer, I understand my responsibility to render some sort of assessment of the movie in question--to say if it's enjoyable or intelligent or beautifully made--but with Lost Highway, this seems beside the point. "We can really out-ugly them sons of bitches!" Mr. Eddy (a bad guy, played by Robert Loggia) comments, and that seems to be at least part of the point here. That Lynch is interested in making films with the "ugly" traits of being incomplete, open-ended, self-parodying and over-dramatic is not in question, given his output to date. He can really dish out some unsettling, unfinished-looking stuff. The question is, can you take it?

I happen to be able to take it, and am sort of a David Lynch fan. I loved the first half-hour of Lost Highway, a strange, noir-style crime story that looked like it was shot on film stock that had been somehow soiled or aged. In this section, Patricia Arquette plays a lip-sticked, '40s-style femme fatale, wandering through her tidy, 1970s ranch house in high heels and feathers; vigilant, but for what? She's married to a musician, Fred, brilliantly played by Bill Pullman. (The dull, everyman quality which makes Pullman so forgettable in other roles is a perfect match with Lynch's nightmare style.) It seems that someone is leaving mysterious videotapes on the couple's front steps. The two regard each other suspiciously, oddly connected to each other and disconnected at the same time, like characters in a Beckett play.

I found this first section very funny in a way that's hard to define. For example, the film is so dark at times that you can't see anything at all--it's as if Lynch is saying my noir is darker than yours. The dialogue is elliptical, the characters speak slowly then stare at each other, Satan turns up in the person of Robert Blake, and it's all so horrifying and wrong that it somehow translates into pure delight.

After this, though, we pass through a dream-like transition to the last two-thirds of the movie, an affiliated but different story that seems to be "about" the anxiety of identity. (All Lynch movies are about anxiety; the trick is figuring out which variety.) I didn't like this portion as well as the first: My attention wandered, the satire seemed less sharp, and the performance of Balthazar Getty, who plays Pete, lacked the riveting, tense, understatement of Pullman's. When I walked out of Lost Highway, I thought: Overall, sort of annoying.

But then something happened. For the rest of the afternoon, I felt disturbed, violated, suspicious--like maybe I'd been kidnapped by aliens earlier in the day. I couldn't stop thinking about Lost Highway, and now, several weeks later, I've decided it was pretty great and want to see it again.

The reason for this, I've concluded, is that Lynch is either an idiot or a flawed genius (and considering the brilliant Eraserhead, I'm inclined toward the second), and his work should be considered on a level of its own. Lynch deals with themes of guilt and hidden pleasure that other filmmakers don't even see--how the act of looking can be a violation (the devil carries a video camera in Lost Highway); how on-screen sex is always a form of exploitation (wives turn into porno stars); how filmmaking and acting are forms of deception (the actors switch identities like trading cards), as is linear story-telling (it's not linear). Lynch gets it down to the uncomfortable, unconscious level of what it means to stare at sexy strangers on a screen, and what he shows us is appropriately messed-up.

So, in the self-contained hierarchy of David Lynch movies, I'd say Lost Highway is better than Wild at Heart and Fire Walk With Me, though not as good as Blue Velvet or the canonized Eraserhead. Prepare yourself to feel alienated, and think twice before bringing a date.