David Lynch - Eraserhead (1977), 7/10

The emotional effectiveness of Eraserhead is almost undeniably successful and powerful. Primarily driven by its visual and sonic interpretations of fear and anxiety, the film’s influences are immediately recognizable. Any number of Kafka’s stories could be cited as inspiration along with a few other modernist tales Lynch was likely to have read at this time. The specific fears Lynch explores are interesting as subjects and more effective for their personal expression, but their specifics are less important than the visualization of fear as a concept, which he accomplishes and encapsulates remarkably well. So well in fact that the film is genuinely disturbing in the most satisfying fashion, creating the ideal of idiosyncratic film. The story and its deeply felt tension even inspire laughter in the same way Kafka’s stories do for readers and did for their author. It somehow transcends originality to create an irreplaceable and irreproducible picture. The non-musical nature of the soundtrack pairs beautifully with its images, just as its progression reflects a deep drift into the chasm of fear, clearly and obviously resembling a series of nightmares all inspired by Lynch’s experiences. Jack Nance as Henry Spencer perfectly captures the expression and behavior of an individual subject to his environment and the crushing emotion of horrified anxiousness. It is, however, most successful as a study rather than as pure film. Some of its parts lean to wholeheartedly into body horror or simply grating visuals and sounds, especially during Lynch’s fixation on the deformed child. It is simultaneously limited by its greatest strength in its abstractness, or perhaps more specifically by Lynch’s approach to presenting the abstract. The best moments of the film are in its first act where Lynch balances emotions more gracefully, and while the full committal to fear and anxiety is perhaps unavoidable it does not create an ideal narrative experience in the visual medium. Still, Eraserhead is an essential, undeniably forceful, and remarkably successful exploration of dread.