In 1992 it was critically savaged and fast forgotten. But the new TV series has helped reveal the film to be a harrowing tour de force that shuns easy answers

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s film maudit. With the revival of the director’s seminal TV series currently earning acclaim, it might be hard from today’s perspective to fathom the stink the prequel caused when it was released back in 1992. Although there has been a critical reappraisal in recent times, Fire Walk With Me’s reputation at the time was of the atrocious movie from a director who’d lost his pop-surrealist mojo.



When it was released in 691 screens across the US on 28 August, the show’s rabid fanbase were feverishly expecting another slice of quirky cherry pie on a bigger canvas, with all their favourite characters back and as adorably odd as ever. Instead, they were presented with an intense, sordid, phantasmagorical tragedy about sexual abuse and loneliness, filled with bizarre sequences and wacky details – David Bowie showing up as rogue FBI agent, for instance – that, detractors claimed, made zero sense to anybody but the director and co-writer Robert Engels.

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Even before the cameras rolled, it was clear things weren’t going to plan. The show’s co-creator Mark Frost fell out with Lynch over whether the movie should be a straightforward sequel to the two TV series or a prequel focused on Laura Palmer’s last days. Frost walked away. Kyle MacLachlan dragged his feet over returning to play the heroic Agent Dale Cooper, finally acquiescing only to a small role. Lara Flynn Boyle then threw a major spanner into the works by refusing to come back as Donna Hayward. This was a potential project wrecker. In the end, Lynch was forced to recast Moira Kelly as the new Donna.



Fire Walk With Me’s reception at Cannes has entered festival lore as one of the most disastrous ever. When the credits rolled, any positive responses from the Cannes crowd were drowed out by boos. Reviewers lined up to give the film a shiner, the New York Times’s Vincent Canby summing up the general mood. “It’s not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be,” he wrote. “It glazes the eyes and the mind.”

Even fellow film-makers stuck the boot in. Motormouth Quentin Tarantino, on the Croisette with his era-defining crime movie Reservoir Dogs, blabbed that one of his favourite directors had “disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Bowie as FBI agent Phillip Jeffries Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

After that, Fire Walk With Me was ignored for years, until a revival of its fortunes earlier this decade thanks to critics such as Mark Kermode, who described the film as “maligned but frankly marvellous” in a 2012 video series. The following year, the Village Voice’s Calum Marsh declared it “Lynch’s masterpiece” in a reappraisal that applauded the film’s refusal to offer comfort or easy answers to life’s horrors.

Revisiting Fire Walk With Me today, it is clear the film was a huge creative gamble, paddling in the shallows of the horror genre but never taking the plunge. The opening 25 minutes discombobulate the viewer. The setting is Deer Meadow, a sort of alternate, hellish Twin Peaks, where two FBI agents are investigating the murder of drifter Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley). The only connecting thread to the established plot is Banks’s relationship with Laura’s father Leland. Visually, the evergreen look of the show is completely absent, the screen instead awash with the glow of ambers and gold, or eye-popping neon light. Lynch also had Angelo Badalamenti compose a new theme; a haunting, woozy jazz piece.

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Lynch could only get away with so much on network television, but the big screen afforded him an opportunity to truly show off Twin Peaks’ dark side. The town’s seedy underbelly was picked at like a scab, while the horrors suffered by Laura Palmer were lingered on with surgical focus. Lindsay Hallam, author of a forthcoming book on the film, thinks the allergic reaction in 1992 was in part because “Lynch does not let us off the hook – we are taken so far into Laura’s experience, without any respite and with none of the humour associated with the series”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise as Laura and Leland Palmer. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

Putting Laura Palmer front and centre gave the actor Sheryl Lee the chance to play more than the dead girl wrapped in plastic or her buttoned-down doppelganger cousin Maddy. Laura is reintroduced as alone, afraid and emotionally broken, traumatised by the abuse she is experiencing at the hands of her demonically possessed father. Lee’s capturing of Laura’s inner turmoil and fatalism is virtuosic.

But Fire Walk With Me is not just an artistic triumph in its own right, it’s the key to the entire Twin Peaks universe. At the annual Television Critics Association event in January, the usually tight-lipped Lynch explained that Fire Walk With Me was “very much important” to understanding the events of the new season. He wasn’t kidding. They links are numerous: the meaning of “blue rose”; the function of the jade ring; the use of electricity as a malevolent supernatural force; what became of Laura’s missing diary pages. Most crucially, Phillip Jeffries’s ambiguous line “We live inside a dream” has been revisited in what might be Lynch’s attempt at a unifying theory. “We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream,” Monica Bellucci, playing herself in a black and-white-dream sequence, tells Gordon Cole (played by Lynch), at one point in the new season.

The direction taken by the current series – which is nothing at all like the original – owes everything to the groundwork laid by the prequel. “I’ll see you again in 25 years,” Red Room Laura told Cooper in the bonkers finale of the second season. A quarter of a century on, the film is being rightly rediscovered by fans and critics as Lynch’s unsung masterwork. It took a long time, and it took its toll on its maker, but Fire Walk With Me has finally come in from the cold.





