Eraserhead

Don't try and follow the story too closely, there probably isn't a coherent one there in the first place. However; this doesn't stop David Lynch's first feature film being an extraordinarily compelling perverse treat.

Henry lives in an oppressive industrial world filled with the sounds of throbbing machinery and the white noise sputtering of trapped electricity. His new baby is, to say the least, less than attractive. It coughs and yowls and eats almost anything that comes into striking distance of its hideous excuse for a head.

Henry's situation with his "child" and his emotionally incapable girifriend provide Lynch with scope for a surreal exploration of anxieties about parenthood, sex and relationships which is often deeply unnerving and sometimes blackly hilarious, perhaps most memorably during the bizarre scenes with Henry's girlfriend's family.

Expressionistic photography and lighting in collaboration with an extremely dark soundtrack (which relents for a couple of happy little sing-alongs) contribute enormously to the film's nightmarish atmosphere and magnify the viewer's psychological discomfort.

However unpleasant or eccentric you may consider Eraserhead, it is hard to get away from the fact that it is an intensely imaginative and accomplished piece of film making; a quite singular debut and a distinct foreshadowing of things that were to come from a modem cinematic King of Weird.

Review by Iain Harral
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95