CW: Discussions of abuse, sexaul assault, rape, and other heavy materials, as well as spoilers for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, ahead
My job is to know what to say about movies when I finish watching them, and yet I sat there speechless. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me left me so shattered I could only sit in silence on my living room couch. After digesting 29 hour-long episodes of Twin Peaks, I thought I was prepared for whatever this universe threw my way. Wrtier/director David Lynch, though, delivered a prequel motion picture that's intentionally and deftly distinct from what aired on ABC in the early 90s. The result is something I couldn't immediately formulate words to respond to. I just saw there, marinating in my tears, stewing in my melancholy, submerging myself in the artistry I'd just witnessed.
At the start of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, two FBI agents visit Deer Meadow, investigating the murder of Teresa Banks. A woman operating a diner only recounts Banks as a woman "who was always late for work" and addicted to cocaine, though she never saw Banks actually using the drug. Meanwhile, the local police make mocking jokes at the agents daring to actually care about what happened to this woman. Immediately, Lynch reinforces a tragic staple of reality. Whether they've been abused or murdered, women and girls are minimized and dehumanized.
"What was she wearing?"
"She was asking for it!"
"She was always trouble."
"If only she'd smiled more."
Venture into the comment section of any social media post about the wave of trans women murders in America in 2026 and you'll see people working overtime to say "this isn't a problem" and erase these horrors. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me opens with a half-hour of storytelling reaffirming this cruelty. A brief mid-movie cutaway to Twin Peaks characters Leo and Sheryl, the former of whom physically abuses the latter, reinforces that reality. After that prologue, Fire Walk With Me shifts focus to Laura Palmer's (Sheryl Lee) last seven days alive in the town of Twin Peaks. Lynch is dimensionalizing a woman who will soon endure all the posthumous cruelty women endure after their anguish.
I couldn't have prepared for how emotional seeing Twin Peaks and its denizens before Laura Palmer's murder would make me. It's like gazing at photos of a small town before a tornado capsizes it or the last photographs of people waving before they climbed aboard the Hindenburg. Here are snapshots of human beings whose lives will soon be upended. They can't imagine what's lying around the corner. While a nightmare lurks in wait for these townspeople, though, Palmer is already enduring a Hellish existence. Snorting drugs to get by in an average day and walking around her household terrified of running into Bob, Palmer's daily psychological turmoil is immeasurable. Only with her best friend Donna Hayward (Moira Kelly) does she find some fleeting peace.
The surrealism dominating Lynch's works gets dialed up in Fire Walk With Me compared to Twin Peaks, but those sequences exist alongside raw, almost observational depictions of Laura's day-to-day turmoil. The best example of this comes from a brutal scene depicting Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) tormenting his daughter over her "dirty fingernails." Told in wider shots with realistic lighting and neither any off-kilter editing nor heightened imagery, this entire exchange could've been lifted from a John Cassavetes directorial effort. The rawness radiating off the screen heartbreakingly communicates the grueling world Laura exists in. Even dinnertime is an opportunity for her to be cut down again by people who're seemingly supposed to protect her.
Living with psychological trauma makes for an unpredictable existence. One scent enters your nose, or some sound is heard in the distance, and suddenly you're at the mercy of your trauma, unable to escape it. Lynch and company demonstrate such empathy and thoughtfulness in realizing the fractured existence Laura Palmer navigates. They're restoring the nuance, dimensionality, and humanity to a woman who first appeared in Twin Peaks as a corpse. A memory in the original show is here a person whose turmoil captured and broke my heart. Part of this masterful execution is in depicting her life through different filmmaking modes. The traumatic dinnertime scene is raw and stripped-down.
Meanwhile, though, a later sequence involving Palmer and Donna at a disturbing party hosted by Jacques Renault deploys extremely heightened lighting. Everything's coated in blue and red hues, a sharp contrast to Fire Walk With Me's default color scheme for "everyday reality" scenes. To boot, everyone's dialogue is intentionally so distant and fuzzy that subtitles appear to clarify what they're saying. The specific surrealist visual and sonic qualities of this sequence are extremely well realized. Furthermore, they're tremendously effective in simulating the sensation of wandering through a nightmare (a fitting term for Palmer's sexual trauma and exploitation). These haunting qualities inform not just another evocative Fire Walk With Me sequence, but also accentuate the multi-faceted nature of this film's depiction of Laura Palmer's anguish.
Her misery manifests in many ways, from grueling realistic dinnertime scenes to this Jacques Renault sequence, just as Palmer had so many layers to herself as a person.
Fire Walk With Me is a masterful demonstration of Lynch's offbeat and precisely realized filmmaking offering a window into a tortured person's soul. I was especially fascinated by inexplicable visuals providing a vivid encapsulation of psychological turmoil appearing anywhere. One of the most memorable instances of this comes when Palmer is loading up Meals on Wheels confections with her diner co-worker. The sun is shining. There's initially no ominous music on the soundtrack to indicate things are afoot. Suddenly, though, a woman and her masked son appear from the bushes, handing Palmer a framed painting. It doesn't matter if a day's visual cues suggest "harmony." These beings manifest at any time.
So too does psychological torment or abuse from family members materialize on any given day. Fire Walk With Me's depiction of that reality is overflowing with unforgettable bravura. From its 30-minute opening prologue focusing on two new FBI agents (which establishes the wider world of hostility towards women) to the most audacious avant-garde imagery, this entire movie is a gutsy enterprise. Said production staunchly eschews giving audiences either what they want (like surface-level fan-service) or clear-cut answers. Laura Palmer rarely got closure in her life. So many survivors of sexual abuse or assorted traumas similarly persist without satisfying resolutions to their agony. A film like Fire Walk With Me about humanizing those perspectives shouldn't be any different.
Richly human intent has always lurked behind Lynch's phantasmagoric filmmaking. Eraserhead was about the anxieties of fatherhood. Blue Velvet delved into the depravity lurking beneath "clean-cut" America's suburbs. One of my personal favorites, Lost Highway, is a nightmarish descent into having no control over our own identities. Fire Walk With Me continues that tradition with aplomb. That achievement, though, heavily comes down to Sheryl Lee's lead performance as Laura Palmer. There are so many engrossing scenes in this production functioning as basically a demo reel for Lee's boundless chops.
That quiet moment where Palmer's talking to Donna about falling in space? While the camera gently zooms in on Palmer and Lee's dialogue delivery is quietly clipped with haunted torment? Mesmerizing. Lee's depiction of Palmer collapsing into bushes after seeing Bob in her room, meanwhile, had me blubbering in my apartment. There's an unflinching rawness to her acting here, particularly in her jagged breathing and her portrayal of Palmer repeating certain phrases to herself. Later Fire Walk With Me scenes depicting Palmer at her most psychologically distraught (like her laughing after witnessing a murder) are similarly shattering.
One of those scenes depicts Laura talking to James and saying, "Your Laura disappeared." This sequence magnificently distills cinema as a unique art form where multiple artists converge to create something extraordinary no one person could accomplish. Sheryl Lee's performance is, of course, transfixing here. She's perfectly captured by camerawork from Lynch and cinematographer Ron Garcia. Accompanying this sublime acting and imagery, though, is Angelo Badalamenti's chilling score. For this sequence, Badalamenti deploys the familiar "Laura Palmer's Theme" from the Twin Peaks show. This time, though, it materializes in a slower, piano-only form.
It's like I was hearing these notes for the first time given their sparse yet impactful manifestation here. This music cue emphasizes the momentousness of these three words leaving Laura's mouth as she bemoans how "even knows me. There are things about me...even Donna doesn't know me."
Every aspect of this scene and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as a whole lends haunting insight into Laura Palmer. To boot, Angelo Badalamenti's recontextualization of recognizable artistry with its use of "Laura Palmer's Theme" is a microcosm of how Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me takes a pre-existing world and injects a new, shattering story into it. Christ, the final ten minutes alone, culminating in Palmer's death and, beforehand, also offering fragmented glimpses at Jacques raping Palmer, is downright grueling. Even here, though, Fire Walk With Me avoids lapsing into exploitative misery porn like Angelina Jolie's In The Land of Blood and Honey.
Specific visual details from Lynch, Garcia, and editor Mary Sweeney underscore that Palmer's point of view is paramount here. Notice how in the heartbreaking train-set "I thought you always knew it was me" scene, Palmer is at the center of the frame, while so much of her explicit rape and murder is kept off-screen. The impact of these horrors is felt, but the emphasis remains on Palmer's psychology and how she processes the misery inflicted on her. This delicate balance is realized with such artistry and immense resonance that I was left scrambling for words yet blabbering about its mastery. There's a paradox that would fit right into both David Lynch's filmography and the world of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
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