Mulholland Drive, what a visually beautiful, unorthodox and interesting story wrapped in a pile of horse shit.
In a BBC piece in 2025 it was praised as "the greatest film of the 21st century" and looking at the film poster, I was intrigued.
Spoiler warning
As I'm a bit frustrated with this film, I'll allow myself to refer to a bunch of story bits, including spoilers, in the rest of this review. If you want to see the film, go do it. Don't read further. Oterwise, join me in my expression of all sorts of emotions.
The story
The story, at its core, is great and unusual. It is also criticial of the movie industry and Hollywood, so it has a lot going for it! I also really liked the way it's set up - with dreams and non-linear narration it's definitely original and interesting. It also has a few different storylines of different characters happening separately and crossing over here and there.
But here comes one of the problems - these lines are sometimes only alluded to, sometimes they're not well embedded with the rest and inconsequential. Not only that, but some of the main storylines are chaotic and meandering, not really getting to the interesting parts or filling it with pointless but very-artsy-and-intellectual-sounding dialog. At the same time a lot of the dialog makes you go: "Wow, has the man who wrote this ever talked to an actual human woman?" - it just doesn't seem right.
The visuals
Visually the first thing that caught my eye is the neo-noir style and visual aesthetics. I really liked that. The lighting, the colorgrading, how light and shadow is used. The camera work in general is interesting and supports the story well. The softness and haziness adds to the dream scenes and the mystery the film portrays. Using stages in various scenes is adding to this immersion and fits the scenario really well, too.
Using color - the blue key, the blue box, the heavy blue neon and dark velvet tones in the Club Silencio - it's a very clever way to foreshadow things and tie the different storylines together. The scenes at Winkie's are also amazing, visually - the camera movements, the way we're put into a nightmare in full daylight and in a setting as harmless as a diner - wild. And yet, as we're about to learn later, this has been where Diane's downfall and her nightmare that we'll join the rest of the film, began.
The rest
The sound design is sometimes great (Club Silencio or the diner scene with the jump scare), but often the music seems misplaced, almost randomly chosen. To the point that it detracts from the rest. Some of the parts also seem like they're just padding - the part with the producer's cheating wife. The whole mob boss bits. Eh. Yes, they're intertwined with the other bits and they're referenced back later, but if you'd cut these parts, you'd almost lose nothing. Instead, you'd end up with a less diluted story, in my opinion.
In general, it feels like there's an interesting experimental story of dreams, intersecting, a drama of a love story that escalates into a hit job. Sitting beneath it is a critical look at Hollywood and its dark side. But it all gets muddled up, distracts itself and shrouds that in a thin veil of "this is art, you probably wouldn't understand".
Fine, maybe I'm not smart enough to get this, but I'd rather spend time with great film art, such as Metropolis, 2001: A Space Oddyssey or other beautiful works of the cinema history than this piece.