10 great Lynchian films

Cinema dealt with dreams, the subconscious, the surreal, and undercutting the supposed Norman Rockwell-like wholesomeness of American life long before David Lynch began making films. But did anyone go as far as he did in making the subversive and the experimental part of the mainstream?  

The term ‘Lynchian’ is up there with adjectivised director surnames like ‘Hitchcockian’ or ‘Spielbergian’ as instantly conjuring his distinctive audiovisual style, themes and mood: dream logic and doppelgängers; film noir-inflected mysteries and Moebius strip narratives; industrial soundscapes and heartrending pop ballads; bland suburban domesticity slipping into terrifying interdimensional realms and incarnations of evil.

It’s hard to think of any directors who came before Lynch and remained as uncompromisingly avant-garde (even, arguably, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí in their 1920s surrealist heyday), while becoming such a part of popular culture. TV series Twin Peaks was a genuine global phenomenon in the early 1990s. And the beguiling, disturbing likes of Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Dr. (2001) have all seeped into our collective psyche.

One can laud Lynch’s purity of vision – even in seeming outliers such as Victorian biopic The Elephant Man (1980) or the ill-fated sci-fi epic Dune (1984) – and still try to connect his work to certain artistic antecedents, as well as playfully suggest which later filmmakers have been imprinted by his oeuvre. But, ultimately, it’s more entertaining diversion than prescriptive model. 

As Lynch himself, famous for gnomic phrases rather than detailed dissections of his films, was prone to say: “Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole.” 

Director: Victor Fleming

The Wizarding World of… David Lynch? Lynch once admitted at a post-screening Q&A that “not a day goes by…” that he didn’t think about 1939’s quintessential American fantasy. Indeed, it’s such a famous touchstone for him (you can spy a still from The Wizard of Oz in his workshop in documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016)) that its influence goes far beyond the multiple, explicit homages and references in Wild at Heart (1990).

Dorothy being swept up in a Kansas tornado and landing in Oz’s weird on top, Technicolor magic kingdom is a kind of prototype for the various innocents thrust into Lynch’s shadow worlds, who must confront various wicked antagonists and manipulative men behind the curtain. Speaking of curtains, Lynch’s penchant for lush drapes, red shoes, even the Yellow Brick Road as an urtext lost highway, could all be seen as formative, recurring Oz influences. For even more ideas on how it informs his work, check out 2022’s fascinating doc Lynch / Oz.

Directors: Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid

Lynch famously started his devotion to the art life as a painter. In his moving image work, narrative coherence regularly cedes to personal, striking images (and of course, sound). In that respect, he echoes 1940s surrealist filmmaker Maya Deren who, as early as 1946, declared her belief that cinema was being held back by “the emphatic literacy of our age”, citing painting’s “visual logics” as one way to break this storytelling dependency.

Of all of Deren’s influential body of work, the silent, 14-minute Meshes of the Afternoon (co-credited to her partner at the time, Alexander Hammid) feels most akin to Lynch’s oneiric preoccupations. Deren herself plays a woman whose dreams in her LA home – her own Inland Empire? – loop back around key symbols (including a key, like Mulholland Dr.) and evoke anxieties around fragmented identity, crossing thresholds of reality and undermining the domestic space. And her chilling, black-cloaked, mirror-faced stalker, conjures up Twin Peaks’s nightmarish home invader, Bob.

Director: Delmer Daves

In a remote farmhouse, an elderly brother and sister (Edward G. Robinson and Rebecca’s Judith Anderson) eke out a living with their adopted high-school-age daughter. When they hire her classmate to help out, long-buried, sinister family secrets start to surface – as does the malign influence of the surrounding woods. According to an increasingly hysterical Robinson, they’re haunted, due to the presence within of the eponymous abandoned domicile.

So, if not a Twin Peaks supernatural Black Lodge, the red house here stands in for the sins of the past, an alternate history of mystery, murder and madness. Working from a serialised 1940s novel, director Delmer Daves, aided no end by Miklós Rózsa’s frenzied score and sound effects worthy of Lynch’s audio collaborator Alan Splet, leans into this fable’s jarring oddball energy: wholesome teens in peril from violent, carnal desires and a(n) (un)natural world more ominous than it first appears.  

Director: Blake Edwards

It’s not so much the overall ambience of Blake Edwards’s underseen neo-noir that perhaps inspired David Lynch – at heart, it’s a police procedural chasing down a ruthless blackmailer. But there are some striking connections nonetheless, starting with a nocturnal car ride title sequence scored to a sinuous, smoky Henry Mancini score that wouldn’t be out of place on a Lynch / Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack. Uncannily, the car then pulls into a residential area called Twin Peaks…

That’s not all. When Lee Remick’s bank clerk heroine is terrorised by the wheezing sadistic killer, his up close and personal attentions remind one of Bobby Peru’s lascivious tormenting of Lula in Wild at Heart. The initially unseen villain is asthmatic, so he uses an inhaler, rather than Blue Velvet’s Frank sucking on his gas stimulant concoction. But when his identity is finally revealed? First name, Garland (like Twin Peaks’s Major Briggs); his surname? Lynch…

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s most daringly experimental masterpiece doubtless inspired numerous filmmakers who came after him. Sure, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) or Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) also explored notions of shape-shifting identity or symbiotic female relationships, but there’s something about Persona’s dreamlike expression of these ideas that seem to have been absorbed through a gossamer-thin membrane directly into Lost Highway, parts of Twin Peaks, Inland Empire and, especially, Mulholland Dr.

For Bergman’s tortured actress Elisabet and cajoling nurse Alma, read Lynch’s harried starlet Rita and perky would-be detective Betty. We subsequently see Lynch’s duo’s identities flip into a doomed love affair more visceral than the Elisabet / Alma merging. But the way both films fracture themselves – Bergman’s film reel literally burning out, while Lynch’s collapses in Club Silencio – offers unforgettable takes on the sometimes vampiric nature of intimate relationships, the power – and limitations – of cinema and the self-deceptive stories we tell ourselves. 

Director: Shinya Tsukamoto

Shinya Tsukamoto’s gonzo cyberpunk nightmare could easily be seen as a splicing of two hugely influential North American filmmakers called David: Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), its black-and-white beauty presenting acts of surreal brutality and outlandish metaphors for ongoing psychological breakdown; and Cronenberg, primarily Videodrome (1983), for its unstinting body horror, refracting how we transform as technology embeds itself ever deeper into our lives.

Tetsuo drills down into an anonymous Japanese worker who wakes to find iron shards in his body and his gradual assimilation into a metal-man hybrid. In terms of absorbing Lynch’s debut feature, there’s a more aggressive sexual component here compared with Eraserhead’s Henry and his sexual / parental fears. But debts to Lynch’s seductive, grungy, monochrome sheen and, crucially, the discordant, heavy soundtrack loom large, even if the end result looks as if Lynch and Cronenberg gruesomely merged in The Fly’s teleportation pod, then emerged in an alternate, dystopian Tokyo.

Director: Lucile Hadžihalilović

An avowed devotee of surrealist art, Franco-Bosnian filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović has forged her own distinctive cinematic path: placing young protagonists amid mysterious, self-contained, fable-like worlds where adults frequently seem to be ready to prey on their, er, innocence. Her most recent feature, The Ice Tower (2025), with its jaundiced view on the movie industry’s parasitical nature, arguably has more directly in common with Lynch’s own poison pen missives to Hollywood, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire.

Hadžihalilović’s feature debut, based on a 1903 Frank Wedekind novella, is effectively a parable about the grooming of young girls in a country boarding school. Yet despite the general absence of young children in Lynch films, Innocence sets up their stylistic and thematic kinships: sensual symbolism, dense, disquieting aural layers, the sense of malevolent, largely unseen forces manipulating from the shadows. Moreover, she rarely explains away her hypnotic creations – something Lynch surely admired.

Director: David Robert Mitchell

David Lynch loved noir-ish mysteries. He was especially fond of Los Angeles-set noirs (some of his own named after specific California locations) that exposed the seamier tendrils beneath the city he called home. So, one wonders what he made of David Robert Mitchell’s sunny, shaggy dog (killer) / missing girl conspiracy, set in a famous Eastside neighbourhood envisioned as both authentically hipster and surreally heightened, in a style not dissimilar to his own?

Andrew Garfield’s slacker owes more to, say, Thomas Pynchon’s rumpled Inherent Vice sleuth than Lynch’s straight-arrow Blue Velvet amateur investigators. However, the way that clues, glyphs, pop songs, colourfully kooky characters and genuinely spooky avatars pile up around his often unsympathetic obsessive, deliberately flirts with a dayglo Lynchian vibe. The film even casts Mulholland Dr.’s unfortunate diner dreamer Patrick Fischler as a paranoid zine creator who ushers Garfield on his labyrinthine trip into the Californian underworld.

Director: Charlie Kaufman

If ‘Lynchian’ became its own cinematic descriptive, surely ‘Kaufmanesque’ (writer-director Charlie rather than performer Andy) did too? Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending, existential, often meta-textual tragicomedies (including scripts for Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002), and fully helming Synecdoche, New York (2008)) have bred their own imitators (say, Stranger than Fiction (2006) or Dream Scenario (2023)). Neither needs the support of the other to justify their inimitable sensibilities.

That said, perhaps their greatest overlap is this unsettling, identity-splitting curio.  Ostensibly about a couple’s failing relationship, Jesses Plemons and Buckley’s journey to Jake’s (Plemons) family home and smalltown high school, with its non-sequitur dialogue and glimpses of an alternate reality (including a very Lynch-like ’50s-style food stop / diner), thrums with Twin Peaks’ subliminal menace. It’s arguably as uncomfortable a watch as Inland Empire, and as insidiously chilling as Mulholland Dr., particularly – spoiler alert – mirroring its tragic climax, and likely following through on Kaufman’s title claim.

Director: Jane Schoenbrun

While some filmmakers bristle at critical claims of a creative debt to David Lynch, Jane Schoenbrun has been proudly vocal in citing just how powerful an influence Twin Peaks (the 1990s original and 2017’s The Return) was on their phantasmagorical second feature. Referencing the show’s cliffhanger where evil spirit Bob possesses Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI hero, Schoenbrun stated, “part of the inception of I Saw the TV Glow is wanting Dale Cooper to get out of the lodge.”

Centring on two young adults’ memories of childhood fantasy TV show ‘The Pink Opaque’, and a missing person, I Saw the TV Glow pulses with psychically evoked monsters lurking in suburbia and a lo-fi, static dread ambience. Yet Schoenbrun’s haunting, heartbreaking film does more than adopt Lynchian horror tropes. Instead, it evolves into a dreamlike, intensely personal tale – acknowledging how art can live on within us, make us question our emotional and sexual identity – that emits its own unique, plangent pulse.

David Lynch: The Dreamer plays at BFI Southbank and BF IMAX in January.