‘Mulholland Drive’: the film Lynne Ramsey describes as “a perfect LA horror story”
Since the late 1990s, Scottish director Lynne Ramsey has created films preoccupied with the intermingling of children and young people with death and grief. After watching Maya Deren’s experimental short film Meshes of the Afternoon, Ramsey applied to film school on a whim, initially focusing on cinematography due to a background in photography. However, the filmmaker soon realised that she wanted to direct, eventually graduating from the National Film and Television School with a specialisation in cinematography and direction.
Ramsey’s graduation short, Small Deaths, won the prestigious Cannes Prix de Jury prize in 1996, which she took home a second time for her 1998 short Gasman. She then released her tender debut feature, Ratcatcher, in 1999, which follows a working-class child who accidentally becomes responsible for his friend’s death. Not only is Ratcatcher an intimate portrait of some of Scotland’s most poverty-stricken households, but it is also a sensitive coming-of-age tale, illuminating the inner workings of a child’s mind, coming to terms with the absurdity of life.
Following Ratcatcher, Ramsey released the dizzyingly melancholic 2002 psychological drama Morvern Callar, which earned her rightful critical acclaim. It took nine years for Ramsey to deliver another feature film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, which was considerably more commercially successful. Most recently, Ramsey directed You Were Never Really Here, which won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes Film Festival.
For BFI’s Sight and Sound ‘The Greatest Films of All Time’ poll, Ramsey was asked to contribute her own picks, choosing movies she declared as “pushing cinema to new realms”. Amongst picks such as The Wizard of Oz, Stalker and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ramsey selected David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mullholland Drive as a “perfect LA horror story”. She writes: “Through the prism of David Lynch and bathed in California sunlight, this transcends into the savage, surreal and terrifying.”
Mulholland Drive stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in dual roles, the backdrop of Hollywood becoming increasingly distorted and nightmarish as the film progresses into abstract territory. Ramsey continued: “Seeing what goes on underneath like no other. LA has never been the same since the darkness lurking under its shiny façade and behind a dumpster.”
She stated that Mulholland Drive “echoes Persona in the blurred identities of two woman,” another film on Ramsey’s list, which she described as “a stunning film, deceptively simple on the surface.”
She continued: “An experimental delve into the subconscious as the two women blur and merge. Who is who? And whose story belongs to whom?” This reading can also be applied to Mulholland Drive.
