10 / 10
A Car on Mulholland Drive
A limousine winds up Mulholland Drive at night. A dark-haired woman in the back seat realises the men in front are about to kill her. Then a car full of joyriding teenagers slams into them, and she staggers away from the wreck, down the hill into Hollywood, with no memory of who she is. She hides in an empty apartment.
The apartment belongs to the aunt of Betty Elms, a wide-eyed, relentlessly cheerful young actress from Ontario who has just arrived in town to become a star. Betty finds the stranger in the shower. The woman takes the name Rita from a Rita Hayworth poster, and Betty, thrilled to have a real mystery, sets out to help her find out who she is.
For about two hours, Mulholland Drive plays like a strange, funny, beautiful detective story. Then it falls apart, on purpose, and you realise you’ve been watching something else entirely.
Naomi Watts
Naomi Watts had been struggling in Hollywood for years before this, and Mulholland Drive made her a star overnight. Betty is so sunny and innocent she seems almost like a parody of the hopeful starlet, and Watts plays her with a wide-eyed, old-movie brightness that’s funny and touching at once.
Then comes the audition. Betty reads a cheesy soap-opera scene with a leering older actor, and in rehearsal she’d played it as a joke. In the room, she turns it into something raw, sexual and dangerous, and the casting people go silent. It’s one of the greatest scenes of acting on film: an actress playing an actress who reveals, in one scene, that she’s far more than she seemed. It’s Watts showing Hollywood what it had been missing.
In the last part of the film, Watts plays someone very different, and the transformation is shocking. It’s two completely different performances in one film, and she nails both.
For Writers
Betty’s audition reveals that the sweet, naive girl is a far more powerful actress than anyone suspected. One scene reframes the character completely.
Give your characters a scene where they surprise the reader with a hidden capacity: a skill, a darkness, a strength. Set it up by making them seem simple or limited first, so the reveal lands hard. The reader will look back at every earlier scene differently, and they’ll pay closer attention from then on because they’ve learned this character can surprise them.
The key is that the hidden capacity must be consistent with who the character is underneath. Betty’s talent doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s what her dream self believes she is, and it makes perfect sense once you understand the film.
Lynch’s Hollywood
The film is full of strange, funny, frightening side stories. A young director, played by Justin Theroux, is ordered by mobsters to cast a particular actress in his film, and his life falls apart when he refuses. A pair of menacing brothers spit out espresso in disgust. A cowboy delivers a warning in a dusty corral. A man in a diner tells his friend about a nightmare, and they go out back to see if it’s true.
Lynch never filmed anything more terrifying than that diner scene at Winkie’s. It’s broad daylight, two men are talking, and the dread builds until something appears from behind a dumpster. There’s no gore and no music sting, and it’s scarier than almost anything in any horror film.
All of these threads are about Hollywood as a machine that promises dreams and grinds people up. Lynch had been working in and around that machine for decades, and his vision of it is both loving and savage.
No Hay Banda
The film’s most famous sequence takes place at Club Silencio, a strange theatre where Betty and Rita go at two in the morning. A magician on stage tells the audience there’s no band, it’s all a recording, it’s all an illusion. Then a singer, Rebekah Del Rio, performs a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s Crying, and it’s devastating. Betty and Rita sob in their seats. Halfway through, the singer collapses, and her voice keeps going.
It’s all an illusion. The scene tells you exactly what’s happening in the film, and you’re too moved to notice. After Silencio, Betty finds a blue box in her purse, Rita opens it with a blue key, and the film collapses into its second, darker reality.
For Writers
A magician tells the audience it’s all an illusion, and then the film shows them an illusion so moving they forget the warning. Lynch tells you the truth and lets you ignore it.
You can hide the answer to your mystery in plain sight by putting it where the reader is too emotionally engaged to analyse it. Place the key clue in your most moving scene. Readers will feel it long before they understand it, and when they finally work it out, they’ll realise you told them all along.
It’s the fairest trick in fiction. You played straight, and they still didn’t see it. Nobody can accuse you of cheating when the answer was sung to them in the middle of the book.
The Break
What follows is a different story with the same actors in different roles. Watts is now Diane Selwyn, a failed, bitter, heartbroken actress. Laura Harring is Camilla Rhodes, a successful star who was Diane’s lover and has left her for the director. Characters from the first part reappear in new, crueller forms, and the dreamy mystery becomes a nightmare of jealousy, humiliation and despair.
The most popular reading is that the first two hours were Diane’s dream, a fantasy in which she’s the gifted, innocent star and Camilla is the helpless one who needs her, and the last part is the ugly reality she was escaping. Lynch never confirmed any interpretation, and the film supports several. But once you see it that way, every detail in the first part takes on a terrible meaning.
Diane’s story ends in tragedy, and the final scenes are almost unbearably painful. The film closes back at Club Silencio, with a single whispered word: silencio.
For Writers
The film reuses its actors in new roles after the break, so the audience sees familiar faces transformed. The dream and reality mirror each other.
If your story has two worlds, a dream and a reality, a past and a present, a lie and the truth, let the same people and objects appear in both, changed. The reader will start mapping one onto the other, looking for the meaning in the differences, and that work draws them deep into your story.
Don’t explain the mapping. Readers remember the connections they find themselves far longer than the ones you hand them. A character who reappears in a smaller, crueller role says more than a paragraph of explanation ever could.
A Failed Pilot
Mulholland Drive began as a television pilot for ABC in 1999, a follow-up to Twin Peaks. ABC hated it and rejected it. A year later, the French company StudioCanal gave Lynch money to shoot a new ending and turn it into a feature. The dark final act was written and shot for the film.
That accidental history might explain the film’s split structure, and it means network executives nearly buried a great film. Lynch took what they threw away and turned it into his best work. He won the best director prize at Cannes, shared with Joel Coen, and earned an Oscar nomination for best director.
In 2016, a BBC poll of critics around the world named it the greatest film of the twenty-first century so far. Lynch died in January 2025, and it stands as his finest achievement.
How to Watch It
Don’t try to solve it on the first viewing. Let it wash over you. Enjoy Betty and Rita’s mystery, laugh at the absurd Hollywood scenes, get scared at Winkie’s, cry at Silencio, and let the last part hit you. Then think about it for a week. Most people who love this film saw it at least twice before it made sense to them, and it keeps getting richer.
Lynch once offered ten clues to help viewers understand the film, and they’re worth looking up after you’ve seen it. They explain nothing directly, a very Lynch move, and they point you toward exactly the right places.
The Case Against
Some viewers find it baffling and self-indulgent, and there’s no denying it’s long and deliberately confusing. The side stories don’t all pay off, and anybody who needs a clear plot will be frustrated.
Mulholland Drive is Lynch’s finest hour, a heartbreaking film about dreams, desire and the price of wanting to be somebody, and nothing else looks, feels or sounds like it.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Mulholland Drive gives the audience a complete, satisfying mystery and then shatters it, revealing a second story underneath. You enjoy the first part, and the second shows you what that enjoyment was hiding.
A story can reveal its deepest meaning through structure, by letting the reader live inside a character’s fantasy before showing them the reality it was covering.
If your character is lying to themselves, consider letting the reader live inside the lie for a while before you break it.
See It Twice
Yes. It’s a 10: David Lynch’s masterpiece, a mystery, a love story and a Hollywood nightmare, with Naomi Watts giving two superb, completely different performances in one film. See it twice. The second time, it’ll break your heart.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 4 of my film lists