An unsettling short film from the director’s experimental 2000s era.
The short films of David Lynch – those made for his website in the early 2000s in particular – continue to fascinate. Although these films have appeared on the DVD anthology Dynamic:01, that disc itself has not been seen by many people and has yet to be upgraded to Blu-ray. Perhaps it never will be.
The 8-minute film The Darkened Room has a distinctly Lynchian vibe, featuring three women in a two-part scenario. In the first half, Etsuko Shikata looks out of her window in Tokyo, discusses bananas and then tells us that she has a friend who is sitting in her apartment alone, crying. We then cut to said friend, Jordan Ladd. A third woman, Cerina Vincent enters and it all becomes very unsettlingly dark.
The film feels like a brief distillation of everything that Lynch has fixated on in his feature films – shot on digital video, it captures the dark, unsettling glimpses into things best left unspoken that have run through everything from Eraserhead through Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. If you like Lynch’s work, this will speak to you. If you don’t… then why are you here?
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