Review: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

There is life before Fire Walk with Me, and there is life after Fire Walk with Me.

Let it be known that, due to this film's nature being tied closely to heavy spoilers for the series Twin Peaks, this review will obviously be dripping with spoilers. So if you don't want Twin Peaks spoiled, stop reading and go elsewhere.

Okay, now that the spoiler warning is out of the way, on with the review.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me forms the horrifically tragic and disturbing prelude/conclusion to the Twin Peaks story, focusing on the final week of Laura Palmer's life in intimate and heart felt detail. Contrasting that with a far more lightweight prelude set a year earlier, focusing on Chris Isaak's and Kiefer Sutherland's duo of FBI agents investigating the murder of Teresa Banks, a young woman who is murdered in a way identical way to Laura. In both sections, Lynch shows what makes him such a supremely unique and visionary film maker.

His direction of the Isaak and Sutherland focused prelude shows his knack for supremely unique, self aware comedy. Its supremely dry and offbeat, yet still humorous, serving as a welcome bit of levity before the film plunges headlong into the horrific world of Laura Palmer.

In sharp contrast to the quirky opening, the latter three quarters show Lynch's mastery of raw drama and disturbing psychological horror, intimately tracking the demise of Laura through the last week of her life. His use of light and sound, especially in the gut wrenchingly disturbing rape scene and the nightclub sequence, is like no other director. It transcends the normal boundaries of storytelling, becoming its own frighteningly unique creature that defies classification.

He doesn't just have style though, he also has substance. He brings real, naturalistic performances out of his cast, especially the astounding Sheryl Lee, who carries this film on her shoulders incredibly. Here, we finally get to see Laura as she really was: a tragically fractured girl who puts on a happy face for the world while suffering unspeakable horrors both sexual and psychological. This is heavy, complex emotions she has to express, and she does them beautifully. Additional shout outs go to Ray Wise, who plays the demonically possessed Leland Palmer. He spends most of the film swinging between a broken man who deeply loves his daughter, and a prevented, sadistic man possessed by the otherworldly demon BOB (a frightening Frank Silva). His scenes are filled with an unbearable sense of dread and menace, and Wise does it beautifully.

The rest of the cast, consisting of both Twin Peaks regulars Kyle MacLachlan, Dana Ashbrook, and so on, all give great performances, along with a wonderfully unexpected cameo by David Bowie, who rocks it during his brief moment in the spotlight.

The cinematography by Ron Garcia is amazing in creating both worlds of beauty (the sunlight, almost saccharinely beautiful streets of Twin Peaks) and terror (the otherworldly Black Lodge). He and Lynch drench the film in rich primary colors and golden hues, contrasting it with the gentler, more serene palette that characterized the series.

Angeleo Badalamenti's score mixes both iconic themes from the series with new music that helps craft the story in a musical emotional fabric that ebbs beneath the film. Its great stuff really, and helps enhance so many scenes wonderfully.

Lastly, the sound design is a work of art, taking the most mundane sounds (the sound of a bar band, the sound of a fan-blade sweeping through the air) and making them utterly horrific by warping and twisting them in all sorts of ways.

I must warn those with weak constitutions though, that the film is unflinching in its depiction of Laura's self destructive tendencies. The sexual content is strong, yet Lynch makes sure that any titilation that could be drawn from it is demolished by how broken Laura is or how disturbing the scenario's on scene are.

Also, for those of you who didn't watch the show, you will be hopelessly lost, as this film expects to a certain extent, an audience that already knows the series intimately. As such, certain characters feel unneeded to those out of the know, yet once you've seen the show, you understand them on a new level, and the film takes on a whole new dimension.

So, I believe its an amazing film, albeit one more for the fans of Twin Peaks then those who've never seen the show.

Either way, as a fan of Twin Peaks, I'm giving it 5 stars.