Mulholland Drive (film)

Mulholland Drive is a 2001 neo-noir mystery film written and directed by David Lynch. It follows an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) who arrives in Los Angeles, where she befriends a woman (Laura Harring) who is suffering from amnesia after a car accident. Several other vignettes and characters are shown, including a Hollywood director (Justin Theroux) who must deal with mafia interference while casting his latest film.

The surrealist film was originally conceived as a television pilot for ABC, with footage shot and edited in 1999 as an open-ended mystery. After viewing Lynch's cut, however, ABC executives cancelled the proposed series. Lynch then secured funding from French production company StudioCanal to repurpose the footage into a film, for which he wrote an ending and filmed new material. The resulting film, edited and produced by Lynch's frequent collaborator (and briefly wife) Mary Sweeney, has left the film's events open to interpretation. Lynch's refusal to offer an explanation left audiences, critics, and even the film's own cast to speculate on its meaning. The film considerably boosted Watts' Hollywood profile and marked the last feature film role of veteran Hollywood star Ann Miller.

Mulholland Drive received critical acclaim, earning Lynch the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. It was also a moderate commercial success, grossing $20.1 million on a budget of $15 million.

It is frequently cited as one of the greatest films of the 21st century and among the best films of all time. The 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll ranked it at No. 8, while the director's poll ranked it at No. 22. The BBC and IndieWire named it the best film of the 21st century, and the LA Film Critics Association listed it as the best film of the 2000s. In 2025, The New York Times ranked it at No. 2 on their list of the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century, while The Ringer named Watts' performance as the greatest of the 21st century.

Plot

The film opens with brightly lit images of couples dancing the jitterbug, over which a young blonde woman appears smiling and being applauded. This is followed by a point-of-view shot descending toward a pillow as someone lies down.

At night on Mulholland Drive, a brunette woman in an elegant evening dress narrowly escapes being shot by her chauffeur when another car crashes into them. Left with amnesia, she wanders into Los Angeles and hides in a vacant apartment. The next morning, she is discovered by Betty Elms, an aspiring actress newly arrived from Deep River, Ontario, to stay at her aunt's place. The brunette adopts the name "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth and recalls only that she is in danger. The two become friends and discover a blue key and a large sum of cash in Rita's purse.

A man eating at a diner with a friend recounts a nightmare in which he encounters a monstrous figure in the alley behind the diner. When he and his friend go outside to investigate, a homeless person covered in filth suddenly appears from around a corner and stares at him as predicted by his nightmare, and he collapses in shock.

Film director Adam Kesher is pressured by mob-connected businessmen to cast an unknown blonde, Camilla Rhodes, in his new project The Sylvia North Story. When he refuses, the mob shuts down production and freezes his accounts. He returns home to find his wife cheating on him, is beaten and thrown out of his house, and rejects a sexual advance from his assistant. A mysterious cowboy warns him to cast Camilla. Elsewhere, incompetent hitman Joe Messing botches a job, killing bystanders.

Rita remembers the name "Diane Selwyn" and Betty locates her address in a phone book. A seemingly psychic neighbor knocks on the apartment door, warning that "someone is in trouble", and the building manager Coco later cautions Betty about letting Rita stay. Betty leaves for an audition, where she performs marvelously; a casting agent is impressed and immediately brings her to Adam's audition for The Sylvia North Story. While Camilla auditions with a dull performance of "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star", Betty and Adam share a brief but intense glance before she slips away to keep her promise to meet Rita. Adam agrees to cast Camilla to please the mob.

Betty and Rita visit Diane's apartment complex. A neighbor who recently exchanged units with Diane answers the door (at the exact mid-point of the story) and says that Diane has not been seen in some time and directs them to her apartment. Inside, the two discover a woman's decomposing corpse on the bed. Shaken, they leave. Rita panics and tries to cut off her hair, but Betty disguises her with a blonde wig. That night, they have sex and Betty twice confesses she is in love, though Rita does not respond. They fall asleep, but Rita wakes them both up by chanting "silencio, no hay banda" (Spanish for "silence, there is no band") in her sleep. Rita insists on visiting Club Silencio, where the host explains that there is no backing band and the performances are all pre-recorded. Betty and Rita cry as Rebekah Del Rio performs a Spanish rendition of "Crying", and Betty discovers a blue box in her purse that matches Rita's key. They return to the apartment, where Rita goes to unlock the box before she realizes that Betty has vanished. After unlocking the box, Rita also vanishes.

The narrative shifts to Diane, a depressed and struggling actress who looks exactly like Betty. She awakens in the bedroom where the corpse was found, and the neighbor who switched apartments with her comes to pick up her belongings, warning Diane that two detectives have been looking for her. As Diane moves through her morning in a daze, she recalls memories of her former lover Camilla, a femme fatale actress who resembles Rita. These memories include a volatile sexual encounter and breakup, being forced to witness Adam and Camilla kiss in front of her during a film rehearsal, a dinner party at Adam's house where Diane explains that she moved to Los Angeles with money inherited from her late aunt and that she lost the leading role in The Sylvia North Story to Camilla (to whom Adam then announces his engagement), and hiring Joe at the diner to kill Camilla. During the latter, Joe indicates that Diane will receive a blue key as confirmation that the hit was successful.

The homeless person behind the diner opens the blue box, releasing a tiny elderly couple who are laughing hysterically—the same couple who had accompanied Betty upon her arrival in Los Angeles. In the present, a traumatized Diane stares at the blue key on her coffee table. As she tries to ignore the repeated knocks at her door, she is terrorized by the elderly couple, who had entered from underneath the door and grew back to their full size. She runs into her bedroom and shoots herself, dying in the same position as the corpse discovered earlier. As the room fills with gunsmoke, Betty and Rita are shown smiling at each other. At Club Silencio, a blue-haired woman whispers "silencio".

Cast

Themes and interpretations

Giving the film only the tagline, "A love story in the city of dreams," David Lynch refused to comment on Mulholland Drive's meaning or symbolism, leading to much discussion and multiple interpretations. The Christian Science Monitor film critic David Sterritt spoke with Lynch after the film screened at Cannes and wrote that the director "insisted that Mulholland Drive does tell a coherent, comprehensible story," unlike some of Lynch's earlier films like Lost Highway. On the other hand, Justin Theroux said of Lynch's feelings on the multiple meanings people perceive in the film, "I think he's genuinely happy for it to mean anything you want. He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations. David works from his subconscious." The film was described as a neo-noir.

Dreams and alternative realities

An early interpretation of the film uses dream analysis to argue that the first part is a dream of the real Diane Selwyn, who has cast her dream-self as the innocent and hopeful, "Betty Elms," reconstructing her history and persona into something like an old Hollywood film. In the dream, Betty is successful, charming, and lives the fantasy life of a soon-to-be-famous actress. The remainder of the film presents Diane's real life, in which she has failed both personally and professionally. She arranges for Camilla, an ex-lover, to be killed; unable to cope with the guilt, re-imagines her as the dependent, pliable amnesiac Rita. Clues to her inevitable demise, however, appear throughout her dream.