On a picturesque day in an idealistic suburban setting, a young man (Kyle MacLachlan) returning home from college to visit his hospitalized father discovers a severed ear. After notifying the police and reacquainting himself with the assigned detective's beautiful daughter (Laura Dern) he begins his own investigation which leads him down a nightmarish path to a tormented nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) who is being held as a sexual prisoner by a gas huffing psychopath (Dennis Hopper) and his band of underworld miscreants. Blue Velvet, the most famous film from the terminally weird David Lynch, may be the one that first put me off to the cultish director, but watching it again I began to understand its appeal, and appreciate what he is getting at, in depicting the seedy depravity that lurks behind the artifice of our day-to-day lives. The mood and photography are perfect, MacLachlan and Dern are just right as the sunny innocents, and Hopper is unforgettable as the frighteningly maniacal Frank Booth.
