Darkened Room

I finally got to have a look at this experimental Lynch short after waiting for so long....and unfortunately, it wasn't worth it! Even for a die hard Lynch fan, I found this to be really tedious....

nothing happens, there are long, long, long painful pauses where nothing happens, long, monotonous speeches where nothing is said and the whole thing finishes with the viewer not knowing, or caring, what the hell it was all about, what happened before and what happened afterward.

There was a Mulholland Drive allusion - the blonde girl and the brunette girl were very Diane and Rita -esque, and a Lost Highway moment with allusions to some significant event that happened but cannot be talked about clearly.

Unfortunately, It's all very uninteresting and very dull, nothing happens, it's very forgettable and I think i will delete it from my computer and forget I ever watched it. Sorry David!

Darkened Room is a short film from David Lynch's digital video phase. It starts with an Asian girl who refers ambiguously to a troubled friend, who we then cut to. She is a visibly upset blonde woman alone in room on a sofa whose face is streaked by mascara from her tears. Later a third woman enters and verbally torments her.

This is a technically raw short film which brought me to mind the look and feel of Lynch's last feature film Inland Empire (2006), a film I have mixed feelings about. With that film, Lynch moved away from the gorgeous visual aesthetic he had hitherto been associated with. The change was mainly down to the move from film to digital video, which looks a lot uglier. The sound in this one is pretty amateurish as well, with the hum of the video camera audible at times. There is still an unmistakable Lynch feel to proceedings though with uncomfortably long pauses where little happens, a mysterious situation that is never fully explained (to say the least) and an ominous low soundtrack maintaining a certain feeling of dread. Lynch does generate an interesting tone to a certain extent but the short run-time never allows him to develop the material into anything very engaging, while it's also a little too lo-fi for its own good as well.

What experimental follies David Lynch loves to go into. And, of course, that's the prerogative of any artist with access to the equipment that Lynch has, and as part of how he goes about using the digital medium to put out ideas he wouldn't of had expressed out for everyone to see years ago. This one, however, shows what good and not so good qualities can come with the mental floodgates let open and with little cohesion. Darkened Room, which like Rabbits may have some connection to Lynch's magnum opus Inland Empire, has three parts to it, with the first two actually not bad at all really. The first, which is very random and hilarious in the vein of the director's absurd idiosyncrasies, shows a Japanese woman in her Tokyo apartment spouting off statistics about bananas, in a weird audio voice. Then, by way of the Japanese woman's 'friend', we move on to the darkened room of the title, where a blond girl sits, mascara smeared on her face, sobbing about something that no matter what she says in-between her cries, doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter too much, in this instance at least, that we don't know exactly why she's crying or how long she's been in the darkened room. The amount of emotional connection that can be felt though, and the subtext behind the words, make it something sort of special.

But then comes that last part, which feels MUCH longer than the other two parts combined, where another woman- another friend of the blonde girl- comes in and just talks and talks about something or this or that, and suddenly, like with a snip with a pair of scissors, the emotional connection is snapped, and what we're left with is Lynch's pretentious ramblings feed through and out of this other actress's mouth. In fact, this last part is one of the worst things I've ever seen from Lynch, as it committed something that I don't like seeing from the director much at all- as it doesn't happen too often for me at any rate- which is that it's dull and weird for the sake of it. Nothing gets resolved, and the end is just a 'huh' that isn't a satisfying one in the slightest. I was left with some good memories of Darkened Room, and some very bad ones too. In a sense it's Lynch working stuff out, via digital video and access on his website, and it'll either appeal to some sense or not. For me, it was both.

when I watched this movie the first time I found myself drifting along the screen looking for little hints such as the puppet and missed out on the dialogue completely. The second time I was certain that the girl was pregnant and not allowed back in her old life which is why she claim`s to be left out although sitting inside a room. The puppet is a visual hint that the crying girl has just learned about her new baby boy and her step-mom or sis or even young mom doesn`t seem to be supporting her very well. For a half-a-day production this is a nice little picture that lynch painted, however maybe i was just being dumb but i missed the in-depth a little bit, hence i`ll watch again and again because we know what kind of books lynch reads ... there`s gotta be something out there. who likes lynch likes dali so why not check out the artwork there is ...

This is a very intriguing short movie by David Lynch, and saying the name David Lynch is probably enough for a lot of people. This is your typical Lynch short. A blonde and a brunette are in a dark room. The blonde has been crying, the brunette is talking in a threatening way to the blonde, and that's about it.

With a lot of silent moments, but with the haunting music from Angelo Badalamenti, there is a strange form of suspense. This short feels a little like 'Mulholland Dr.', a movie I loved, and therefore I liked this one as well. It is probably especially for Lynch fans but there is a chance you like this.