Kyle MacLachlan back in Dale Cooper's suit. Credit:Suzanne Tenner/Showtime But while the original series' opening title sequence - the image of a Bewick's wren dissolving through to the sharp teeth of a log cutting saw and the fine spray of the Snoqualmie Falls – held you and slowed your breathing down, these titles are intended to do the opposite. Those near motionless frames from the original opening sequence are replaced by fast moving images, of water and mountains; a gentle reminder, if Lynch is capable of such a thing, that whatever this is, it isn't your mum and dad's Twin Peaks. Most perplexing is that we are not immediately where we expected to be. We have come to this opening episode looking for Laura, Audrey and Bobby, for Norma, Leo and Hawk, Sheriff Truman and Agent Bryson, but instead we have new characters, and new locations, including an unmarked building in New York City which houses an unexplained, seemingly empty glass box kept under tight guard.

Madchen Amick and Peggy Lipton return for the new series of Twin Peaks, which will premiere at Cannes. Credit:Suzanne Tenner/Showtime Those first fragments of story - the glass box, the overwhelming sense that something terrible is coming, a warning from the Log Lady that something is missing, and a grisly murder - may seem individually meaningless but they are like the strewn pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; they are slowly moving towards each other. We're even treated to an encore of Cooper's last encounter in the Black Lodge, this time with the present-day Laura Palmer, beautifully and disturbingly disjointed. (The effect is achieved by performing scenes backwards and then reversing the film.) Twin Peaks, 1990. Lynch may be brilliant, but he's also artfully cruel: there will be no fast payoffs in this Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks is now, as it was then, the iconic suburban soap opera Peyton Place but reflected like a film negative. Kyle MacLachlan, who is returning to the role of Agent Dale Cooper more than 25 years after Twin Peaks ended. Credit:Eric Chakeen It is a perfectly fashioned all-American small town drama, peppered with small touches like white picket fences and bobby socks, but warped until the smiles become crooked, and sharp, brutal smudges of shadow darken the image and mute its primary colours. Completing the mosaic is Angelo Badalmenti's music, a melancholy soundscape which fills every scene with a mournful unease in the same way that Picnic at Hanging Rock's Peter Weir used the slowed-down rumble of an earthquake to instil in his audience a pervading dread. Though Twin Peaks bears the unmistakeable signature of Lynch, it is also true to say it is a unique collaboration: co-writer Mark Frost tempers the writing, and Badalmenti (and singer Julee Cruise) underlines it with a very specific sound.

Without those contributions, it might still be brilliant, but it wouldn't be Twin Peaks. The original series aired in 1990 and 1991 and ran for 30 episodes. It was followed in 1992 by a prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. The capsule plot of the original series went roughly like this: popular high school girl Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was found dead ("wraaped in plaastic") and FBI special agent Dale Cooper arrived in Twin Peaks to investigate. Like almost everything, and everyone, in Twin Peaks, Laura was not at all what she seemed: behind her perfect small-town facade she was a drug addict, prostitute and a victim of sexual abuse. The resolution to her murder was complex: the killer was a malevolent entity named Bob (Frank Silva) who had for years inhabited the body of Laura's father Leland (Ray Wise); that episode, notably, ended with the malevolent Bob returning, this time inhabiting Cooper's body.

The mythology of Twin Peaks is built on the notion that there is a sinister presence in the woods outside the town represented by the Black Lodge, an extradimensional space said to be the path to the White Lodge. The latter is described as a "place of great goodness", while the latter was its opposite, "a place of almost unimaginable power ... full of dark forces and vicious secrets ... a hidden land of unmuffled screams and broken hearts." Its interior – notably "The Red Room" – is a place we've visited intermittently; it is where we met The Man From Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), The Giant (Carel Struycken) and Bob, and it is where Cooper encounters the apparition of Laura Palmer. The original series posed a simple question: who killed Laura Palmer? And it's important to understand that in David Lynch's vision, the answer was beside the point; what mattered more was the journey, the slow formation of an exquisite mosaic of characters, moments and interactions.

To some extent we must approach the reboot – or, if you want to be strictly correct, the third season – in the same way. The first episode leaves us with more questions than answers, but to expect anything different is a mistake. Instead, Twin Peaks must be treated now as it was then: a slow moving painting, detailed almost in real time, as the artist applies stroke after stroke to the canvas, a layered pile of movement, music and cryptic spoken words. It is not so much something which is greater than the sum of its parts, but something which can only be seen as the whole. To split it into its component parts simply breaks it into meaningless, smaller pieces. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ask questions of Twin Peaks. Nor that Lynch has a free pass to meander and make no sense for these 18 highly-anticipated episodes. But like the original, the curious viewer gains nothing by poking and prodding.

Loading Rather, Twin Peaks must be simply gazed into. And like Nietzsche's abyss, as you gaze long into it, it will, eventually, begin to gaze back.