Mulholland Drive

I watched this at the independent cinema on the 7th of June, 2025.

It was so good! Dreamlike and confusing and vivid. I won’t spoil the plot here (honestly I couldn’t if I wanted to, I have no idea what happened), but here are some things I liked:

• the hazy Babylon-like quality of the first half
• the intensity of the intimate scenes, they were so charged! Challengers or Saltburn or the other recent ones can’t really hold a candle
• the creeping unease and tension and scariness despite it really not being a horror movie
• the disjointed memories and unreliability, making you construct it all in your head
• the Pulp Fiction-like multiple intersecting narratives (yeah yeah film bro who’s only seen one film etc etc but it’s the closest one I could think of!)

So good! And while the ending was Deeply Frustrating because it really wasn’t neat and left so many things unsaid, I quite like it in retrospect, it converts the movie from a clean narrative to an Experience ($155 entry, drinks not included, 100k+ followers go free, curated cocktail+book selections, avant-garde Tokyo design house perfumes evoking the tantalising scent of cocaine and crematorium smoke, each unique bottle bearing the stamp of its artisan creator, rooftop bar with waiters who hate you) (sorry, that got away from me a bit) which you half-remember after a while, amalgamating into something morbid and beautiful.