David Lynch's final five features are the boldest run of his career

David Lynch died on January 16, 2025, at 78, of cardiac arrest with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease underneath it. He had been evacuated from his Los Angeles home days earlier as wildfires pushed through the city. He had not directed a theatrical feature since 2006. That is the odd fact sitting at the center of his late career. The most singular filmmaker this country produced spent his last nineteen years not making movies, and almost nobody clocked that it was over until it was.

So here is a look back at the five features that close the filmography, made across fourteen years from 1992 to 2006. Run them in a row and you get a director who stopped worrying about whether you could follow him, and got better for it.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

It got booed at Cannes. The reports are contested (co-writer Robert Engels said he heard nothing, the evening premiere crowd cheered), but the press screening turned ugly, and the reviews that followed were worse. People wanted more of the cherry-pie-and-damn-fine-coffee comedy of the ABC show. What Lynch handed them was the last week in the life of Laura Palmer, a teenager being abused by her father, played by Sheryl Lee with no net under her.

It is a hard watch and it is meant to be. Strip out the soap and the small-town gags and you are left with a horror film about a girl coming apart in real time. For years it was treated as the moment Lynch lost the thread. It plays now like one of his most honest films, and Lee gives a performance the show never had room for.

Lost Highway (1997)

Bill Pullman is a jazz musician who may have murdered his wife (Patricia Arquette). Roughly halfway through, in a prison cell, he becomes a different man, a young mechanic, with no explanation offered then or later. Lynch called the structure a psychogenic fugue and left it at that.

The film died in theaters, about $3.8 million against a $15 million budget after a three-week run. The piece that sticks is Robert Blake's Mystery Man at a party, white-faced and grinning, telling Pullman he is also right now at Pullman's house, then handing over a phone to prove it. Dismissed as a stunt in 1997, it has the cult and the scholarship now. Barry Adamson and Trent Reznor built the score, and Bowie's "I'm Deranged" runs over that yellow-line road at the open and close.

The Straight Story (1999)

The strange one is the gentle one. Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, who in 1994 really did drive a riding lawnmower about 240 miles across Iowa and Wisconsin, at five miles an hour, to patch things up with the estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton) who had just had a stroke. Disney released it. It is rated G.

Farnsworth was 79 and in serious pain from terminal cancer while he shot it, and he carries the whole film on a face that barely moves. He got an Oscar nomination and died the next year. Sissy Spacek plays his daughter. The same eye that found rot under the lawns in Blue Velvet finds something tender in a slow man on a slow machine, and never once winks at you about it.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

It started as a TV pilot ABC passed on. Lynch shot more footage, reshaped the wreckage into a feature, and turned an industry rejection into the high point of his second half. Naomi Watts arrives as a bright-eyed actress fresh off the plane, and the film slowly pulls the floor out from under her.

Spoiler ahead for the structure.

The back third reveals the sunny first half as a dying woman's fantasy, the same faces reshuffled into the people who actually wrecked her. The audition scene, where Watts flips a throwaway reading into something raw, is the best argument anyone has made for what she can do. The Club Silencio sequence, "no hay banda," a band with no band, is Lynch laying his whole method on the table: the emotion is real even when you can see the tape playing. He shared Best Director at Cannes with the Coens. A 2016 BBC critics poll named it the best film of the century so far. That is about right.

Inland Empire (2006)

Three hours, shot by Lynch himself on a consumer-grade Sony PD150 camcorder, in standard definition, with no finished script, over a span of years. Laura Dern plays an actress sliding into the role she is shooting on a production that may be cursed, and the film follows her down without a map.

It is deliberately ugly. The digital image smears, faces loom too close and distort, the dark goes to mud. Lynch wanted exactly that, the cheapness as the texture. He self-distributed it and famously sat on a Hollywood sidewalk with a live cow and a poster to campaign for Dern's performance. Nobody knew it at the time, but that was the last feature.

After

There was more Lynch after 2006. He kept painting, put out music, read the Los Angeles weather to camera most mornings, and in 2017 returned to Showtime with Twin Peaks: The Return, eighteen hours that he liked to call a film. Call it what you want, it is television, and it is some of the strangest, best work of his life. It is not a sixth feature.

The features stopped at Inland Empire. Knowing that, the murk of that last one reads less like a man running out of road and more like one following the image as far down as it would go, then putting the camera down for good.