David Lynch and his rich otherworldly legacy to world cinema

The crime itself remains confined within the musician's home. The tapes offer no clues about the house geography or any locations beyond its immediate scenes.

Like fellow director Jim Jarmusch, Lynch has a remarkable ability to capture the subtle nuances of an actor's face, crafting powerful expressions. The influence of the aesthetic concept of German expressionism from 1920's cinema is clear within Lynch's films.

In Lost Highway, the musician transforms into a car mechanic with no love for music. It is reminiscent of the transformation of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, a story Lynch once contemplated adapting into film.

Blue Velvet (1986)

In Lynch's films, strangeness has no hidden depths; it accumulates continuously, layer by layer, resisting any attempt to define clear meaning or unambiguous interpretation.

His way of creating sensory impressions that are profoundly resistant to rational thought defines what has become known to his fans as "Lynchland"—a collective term for his work.

It emerged following Blue Velvet in 1986, famed for its surrealist shocks. One of the film's most iconic and memorable images is the severed human ear covered in ants that a character, Jeffrey, discovers in the grass while visiting his sick father.

Its unsettling presence guides Jeffrey to an old Victorian structure, the Deep River building, a name reminiscent of something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, or the title of a blues song.

Within resides singer Dorothy Vallens (played by Isabella Rossellini) draped in a gown made from the blue velvet, performing in a nightclub where the night is darker than her dress. With the assistance of Sandy, a police detective's daughter, Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy's apartment.

Jeffrey is not lured to the crime scene by the Hitchcockian thrills characteristic of traditional crime films. Instead, he is driven by a cold, almost scientific curiosity, a characteristic which comes from his interest in red ants.

Lynch, likewise, has a deep appreciation for creatures of the soil, and it is no coincidence that the ants crawl over the ear, one of the film's signature images.

Like the ants in this close-up, which is an early example of the kind of imagery that would define him as a director, it is as if Lynch is probing for something hidden throughout his films, something within the richness of the earth.  

Jeffrey hides in Dorothy's closet, finding himself in the cramped interior of her apartment, which starkly contrasts with the grand exterior of the building. In the Deep River, inhabitants cannot move freely; instead, the oppressive walls dominate the camera's view with a nightmarish presence.

Through the slats of the closet, Jeffrey watches in horror as the sadistic Frank violently rapes Dorothy, a scene made even more disturbing by Dorothy's masochistic submission.

Inland Empire (2006)

Lynch moved away from sexual scenes in his later work. They are lacking in his masterpiece Inland Empire which depicts a strange, mysterious land.

In this labyrinthine realm, he channels the four aesthetic tenets of Jorge Luis Borges: the union of reality and dreams, the self-referential device of a film within a film (akin to Borges' concept of a book within a book), duality, and time travel.

This convergence of influences creates a striking paradox: Inland Empire is a crime film, a genre typically characterised by its adherence to realism, or at the very least, a reluctance to indulge in bizarre or complex narratives. Lynch defies that convention.

His use of the film-within-a-film technique aligns him with visionary directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, and Claude Lelouch. Yet his approach is distinguished by its unflinching brutality and tragic undertones.

For one character, Nikki (played by Laura Dern), the enigmatic presence of a new neighbour with an unsettling Eastern European accent (played by Grace Zabriskie) sets in motion a chain of events that blurs the boundaries between reality and premonition.

The neighbour's prophetic declaration, foreseeing Nikki's casting, is followed by an ominous tale of a young boy's encounter with evil. As the narrative unfolds, the viewer is drawn into a realm where the certainties of time and identity are relentlessly subverted.

The film features a sense of temporal dislocation, echoing Borges' notion of the infinite labyrinth. Through this complex web of narratives, Lynch masterfully crafts a cinematic experience that defies easy interpretation, instead inviting the viewer to surrender to its dream-like logic.

Nikki is confused by the neighbour's story, prompting the neighbour to add with a muffled sneer, "An old story, and there are variations on it. For example, a little girl went to play and got lost in an alley behind the market."

The conversation takes an even stranger turn when the neighbour abruptly asks Nikki about a murder within the film's plot, then cryptically hints that Nikki will forget this entire conversation.

In Lynch's work, protagonists often experience memory loss, or else their fragmented recollections let him blur the film's timelines. This technique makes time ambiguous, diluting the distinctions between past, present, and future.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

It is hard to capture Mulholland Drive with words. Its director prefers to get his point across with images, sounds and music.

Dialogue is part of it, but Lynch's scripts come alive through the performances and the intricate worlds he creates, which so often look like dreams and nightmares.

This makes it difficult to convey the impact of his scenes, but in Mulholland Drive there is one in which the setting and the events seem to combine in a way that is revealing of Lynch and his intentions.

In a sterile Hollywood boardroom are two brothers. One produces a haunting black-and-white photograph of a character in the film, Camilla Rhodes, sliding it across the table with an air of inevitability.

The other says: "That's the girl." It casts a spell and sets the film's atmosphere with an aura of inescapable fate. As the director resists the actress's nomination, tension simmers, punctuated by the brothers' insistence.

In a masterstroke of subtlety, Lynch transforms a subsequent, mundane request for coffee and a napkin into a riveting counterpoint, elevating the trivial to a rival narrative thread.

The coffee is spat on to the napkin with calculated precision. It becomes a catalyst for escalating tension. A member of the production objects, sparking ire from one of the brothers, while the other reiterates, with mesmerising intensity: "This is the girl."

To grasp the mercurial style of the film, and of Lynch, the viewer must surrender to its fluid, intuitive nature, abandoning formulaic approaches for an all-encompassing experience toward revelation.

It is a perilous game of chance, where the stakes are all-or-nothing, and the outcome hangs precariously in the balance. Much like life.