David Lynch’s 1992 prequel to Twin Peaks focuses on Laura Palmer’s final days, stripping away the TV series’ whimsy to confront trauma, abuse, and institutional failure with unflinching rigour. Sheryl Lee’s performance anchors a film defined by dissonant sound, claustrophobic framing, and narrative austerity. Though polarising on release, it has been re-evaluated as a major work of psychological horror and arthouse cinema.
David Lynch followed the disaster of Dune with a $6m film he was left almost entirely alone to make, trading a pay cut for final cut. Kyle MacLachlan's amateur sleuth spies on Isabella Rossellini's abused nightclub singer and runs into Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth, and the American town around them turns out to hide as much as either of them.
Riley Andersen's move from Minnesota to San Francisco throws her mental control room into crisis when Joy and Sadness are accidentally flung from headquarters, forcing them to find their way back through the wreckage of her long-term memory. Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen's Pixar feature spends five personified emotions and a five-and-a-half-year production trying to dramatise, rather than explain, why a child needs to be allowed to feel bad.