David Lynch. You either get him or you don't. Fail to tune into the director's seriously warped wavelength and many of his films will leave you hopelessly lost. As anyone who has seen Mulholland Drive will be only too aware, conventional plotting is just not his bag.

Because strip this film down to the bare bones and it's about, wait for it, one man who turns into another; a woman who may be dead who seduces the man that might have killed her; and a man who is inexplicably at the other end of the line to receive his own phone call.

Set in a typically nightmarish Lynchian world, Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette star as a married couple who are left increasingly disturbing videos on their doorstep. Clueless as to who is leaving them, the unease intensifies as emotionally tortured jazz musician Pullman begins to suspect his wife of having an affair.

As if that wasn't enough, the brooding saxophonist also meets a disturbing mystery man (Robert Blake) at a party, who tells him they've met before at his house. "As a matter of fact, I'm there right now. Call me," adds Blake. Not only does the stranger appear to indeed have the ability to be in two places at once, but in another scene, Pullman also seems to be able to talk to himself over a doorway intercom.

But things haven't even started getting weird yet, because Arquette is found savagely murdered, apparently by her husband, who has no memory of the incident. Thrown in jail (and this is where events become intrinsically Lynchian) Pullman inexplicably becomes an entirely different person. It's a twist which turns the whole film inside out, a disorientating precursor to what would later happen to Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.

The man behind bars is now Balthazar Getty, a garage mechanic who embarks on an affair with the girlfriend of mob boss Robert Loggia. A woman who just happens to look exactly like Arquette.

The focus now shifts to the relationship between Getty and Loggia, a mindless criminal who has connections with a man who makes sex films (an opportunity for Marilyn Manson to make a cameo as a porn star).

To attempt to explain any more of the plot would only add to the confusion, but then again Lynch (who co-wrote the script with Barry Gifford) is never one to indulge in a linear narrative. As the director himself says: "It's so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious, something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoon fed to you."

Words which are well worth bearing in mind when attempting to decipher this oddly compulsive mindbender, which utilizes sparse sets, dulled lighting and severe camera angles to heighten that definitive Lynchian atmosphere.

In essence, Lost Highway simply defies you to take your eyes off the screen, it's pure Lynch in every respect, a film which the director describes as a "21st century noir horror." But it's so open to individual interpretation, any generalization is folly, because as with many of his films, viewers just have to draw their own conclusions.

David Lichtneker