the 6 films and TV shows you need to watch to understand the master moviemaker, Canada Reviews

David Lynch, who died on January 15, 2025, was a real renaissance man, working in all different mediums (film, TV, music, painting) and putting his unique imprint on all of them. As a filmmaker, he worked in genres such as period costume (The Elephant Man) and science fiction (his version of Dune is bonkers), but he was at his best exploring cinematic universes all his own, utilising a clutch of regular actors (Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Jack Nance) and collaborators (cinematographer Frederick Elmes, sound designer Alan Splet, composer Angelo Badalamenti) to bring his fevered dreams to life.

Not all of them worked (1997’s Lost Highway and 2006’s Inland Empire are considered lesser works) but what he left us is a consistent vision that once seen is never forgotten. 

Here’s where to start with this singular artist.

1. Eraserhead (1977)

Lynch’s calling card, Eraserhead was made over a five-year period and financially sustained by donations from friends (including actor Sissy Spacek). It’s a black-and-white nightmare writ real, as a big-haired man (Jack Nance) is left to look after his hideously deformed child in an industrial hellscape. Full of unsettling sights (a menstruating roast chicken! A world behind a radiator!) and disturbing sounds, it has a nutty dream logic that made it a hit on the midnight movie circuit and a lasting cult sensation ever since. 

2. The Elephant Man (1980)

Hired by producer Mel Brooks (who once called the filmmaker ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’), Lynch applied all the stark surrealism of Eraserhead to the story of John Merrick (John Hurt), a disfigured man who is rescued from a Victorian freak show by a kindly doctor (Anthony Hopkins). Demonstrating a feel for society’s outsiders that would course through his career, Lynch draws a touching performance from Hurt hidden under a ton of prosthetics but still letting Merrick’s humanity shine through. One of Lynch’s more mainstream efforts – also see the charming The Straight Story – this is a period drama like no other. 

3. Blue Velvet (1986)

Part film noir, part small-town satire, part horror, Blue Velvet crystallised what we think of as Lynchian, unspeakable horrors and disquiet going on beneath the surface of everyday life. Kyle MacLachlan is the gosh and golly all American teen who turns detective after discovering a severed ear. He is drawn into a twilight world of crime and perversion, featuring a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) and a crazy, unforgettable Dennis Hopper as the gas-inhaling, Heineken-hating crime lord Frank Booth. Controversial on its release, it still earned Lynch one of his four Oscar nominations.

4. Wild at Heart (1990)

‘The whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top,’ says Laura Dern’s Lula Fortune in Lynch’s crime caper, but she might have been talking about his whole filmography. Based on Barry Gifford’s novel, it’s Lynch’s take on the couple-on-the-run motif as Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Dern’s Fortune go on the lam to escape the orbit of Luna’s mother (Diane Ladd, Dern’s real-life mother). Playing with iconography ranging The Wizard Of Oz to Elvis Presley, it’s a batshit crazy ride – Lynch estimated 300 people walked out of a preview, due to depictions of sex and violence – but one that earned him the Palme d’Or at Cannes. A similar award should have gone to Cage’s snakeskin jacket.

5. Mulholland Drive (2001)

Starting life as a TV pilot that was deemed too strange for the small screen, Mulholland Drive is considered by many to be Lynch’s masterpiece (it’s eighth in the Sight & Sound critics poll of the greatest films ever made and 13th in ’s). A non-linear exposé of the film industry’s dark underbelly, it centres on the relationship between an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) and a woman (Laura Harring) left with no memory after a car crash. it’s an intoxicating poison pen letter to Hollywood riddled with ambiguity and, like most of Lynch’s work, ripe for your own interpretations.

6. Twin Peaks (1990-2017)

There is a delicious irony that perhaps Lynch’s weirdest work is his most popular. Lynch’s initially two-season show took the staples of American TV (murder mysteries, soap opera) and Lynchified them, adding metaphysical elements, a camp tone and bizarro humour. The show’s central dramatic question – who killed small town girl Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) – made Twin Peaks appointment television before the phrase even existed. Our interest in the crime was ultimately superseded by our fascination with a clutch of memorable characters, from Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI Agent Dale Cooper to the Log Lady, via the backwards talking The Man From Another Place. Lynch brought the show to the big screen with 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (with added David Bowie) and gifted us a third, equally loopy season 3 in 2017. It was a fitting grace note to an unparalleled career.

Find out which David Lynch film makes our list of the 100 greatest films of all time.

The perfect documentary to understand Lynch’s hidden side.