Fred Madison is accused of murdering his wife Renee and sentenced to death row. Shortly before his sentence is carried out, he mysteriously disappears from death row, and in his place is a confused and unaware Pete Dayton. How did he end up on death row? Where had the killer disappeared to?

Released to freedom, Pete tries to return to everyday normal life, but instead an inexplicable, mind-boggling nightmare awaits him…

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Lynch is often scolded. They call his films nonsense, a muddy stream of consciousness. Or maybe he just doesn’t make movies for everyone. His films are not suitable for most people who are used to watching movies for entertainment and relaxation, and they need a story built according to the usual scheme. The plot, the conflict, the denouement.

David Lynch is an extraordinary director who makes movies about troubled people.

Think of the characters in “Blue Velvet” – fans of S&M, Agent Cooper from “Twin Peaks”, leading conversations with his own tape recorder, a miserable and good-natured mutant from the “Elephant Man”, a failed actress with a broken destiny in “Mulholland Drive …

Here in `Highway Nowhere’ Lynch tells us a simple story about the musician Fred Madison, suffering from sexual impotence and worried about the treachery of his wife. In the end, Fred goes nuts… He suffers from severe stress and suffering and develops schizophrenia. Fred kills his wife in a state of rage and ends up on death row. There he goes completely insane…

Some of the symptoms of schizophrenia are complete disorientation in time and space, splitting of consciousness, creation of side personalities. This is how Pitt Dayton and the other reality that Fred creates for himself emerges. Have you noticed some oddities? For example, everything in Pitt’s life is somehow surprisingly smooth: he is loved at work, his parents are too calm and placid, even the local authority figure honors him… It does not happen in life. Fred’s fantasies begin to report from the image of the burning cabin when Pitt Dayton is born, and there they end. His fantasy goes too far and eventually runs out. So again Pitt becomes Fred. Next, the delirium of the suffering and severely ill man goes in a different direction. He imagines brutalizing his wife’s lover, for he believes that he really should have killed this man and not the woman he apparently loved very much.

And the mystery man is another of Fred’s personalities, only now closer to a brutal reality. He himself tries to sort of shake off Madison, who is completely insane and lost in the wilderness of his inflamed mind. Once at a party, where he suggests that he call himself home, and then at the wooden house, where he asks Fred what his real name is. The mystery man walks around with a video camera, because it shows what’s really going on, not what’s going on in the sick man’s head. The videotapes are scraps of memories of what really happened, lost in the depths of the subconscious.

A special role is given to Renee/Elice. In Fred’s imagination, as he constructs a new reality in the form of Pitt Dayton, the image of the murdered wife appears as a fatal blonde beauty, and, incidentally, her appearance and confuses all the cards in the new cloudless world of fantasy.

In “The Highway to Nowhere,” Lynch has shown us the story of a sick and unhappy man, but has built it in his own way, erasing the boundaries between real and imaginary worlds. Not everyone will like this approach, so it is not surprising that the movie was sharply criticized.
We should also mention a wonderful soundtrack with Angelo Bandalamenti in it. Very symbolic is also the song by David Bowie `I am deranged’. Could this be the key to the film?

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (81.4 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: LPCM 2.0
English: Dolby Digital 5.1

Subtitles
English SDH.