Eraserhead - Will's Review

When writer / director David Lynch (this was his first movie) was asked what Eraserhead was about, he famously replied "it's about 90 minutes".

It's impossible to review Eraserhead in any conventional way, because it simply isn't a conventional movie; I can't say for sure that the sequence of events count as a plot, much less a cohesive one (I'm not even sure they're a sequence in the strictest sense). It's perhaps unsurprising that he movie is popular amongst the chemically enhanced.

Eraserhead isn't a film you watch, it's an experience you have; it's strangeness, coupled with its immersive and relentless soundscape of organ music, and industrial and haunting sound effects (I strongly recommend headphones, if you aren't lucky enough to have external speakers) make it more akin to being in someone else's dream or nightmare... In fact, Lynch has claimed that he didn't write Eraserhead; he dreamt it.

The effects work is noteworthy - especially the "baby", and especially considering the movie's scant $10,000 budget, but I really don't want to give too much away.

Full of industrial sequences and bizarre slices of not-right home-life, Eraserhead is less a movie, more a work of surrealist art, and taken as such it's superb... but as a horror movie, or movie in any traditional sense, it fails miserably.

You'll either love this movie, or hate it; 'get' it, or find it repugnant. For the first time I'm going to both recommend this movie, and suggest that you avoid it; because depending who you are, it's one or the other, with little in-between.