very cute and cosy film

I can appreciate the cinematography, the score, and a big ball of weird being left up for a whole lotta interpretation. But I found this film to be more frustrating than entertaining. I finally decided to check Eraserhead out after seeing it at the tippy top of a bunch of lists and receiving recommendations from friends. In the end, I just wasn’t as satisfied as so many other viewers were.

David Lynch started his career as he meant to continue, with this disturbing surrealist tale of a man who discovers he is to be the father of a grossly disfigured child. As he and his new wife care for it, they slowly descend into madness. Eraserhead quickly sucks the viewer into its drab industrial dystopia with some of the most ominous, chilling sound design work ever put to film. A low hum throbs through the whole picture, it’s uneasy and relentless. Putting so much work into the soundtrack was a clever move, it helps create a world outside without having to build expensive sets and hire lots of actors, while still being incredibly effective. Although the film was made on a shoestring, it never feels cheap. Lynch borrows heavily from film noir and builds on it, taking the genre in a new direction. Almost 40 years since its release, Eraserhead is as bold, innovative and downright unsettling as it ever was. http://benoliver999.com/film/2016/10/29/eraserhead/

“Eraserhead” is one of those symbolic movies, more like a collection of unsettling moving paintings. It’s Lynch's only feature film to be old-school surrealist, though the way reality is distorted could be considered as expressionist. There are sequences that could be interpreted in multiple ways, but the main plot is pretty straightforward. Not that the plot is the main focus here: most situations seem to be visually unsettling just for their own sake. The dark and eerie atmosphere that permeates the whole film is disturbing but at the same so fascinating that it gets addictive over time. You don't exactly know why, but you want to go back and rewatch it every now and then just to feel those weird sensations again, like a haunted house. Every shot has been meticulously constructed with the aim of deeply resonate with your subconscious and awaken feelings or sensations that are hard to express logically. Sound plays a crucial role as well: there is no music at all, extremely limited and uncanny dialogues, but a lot of humming and wheezing mechanical noise which melds perfectly with the cold, hostile wastelands and bare, wretched houses and apartments. That baby is probably one of the most disturbing I have seen in a movie. I still wonder how they managed to make something like that on their own.

David Lynch you are a genius. Never before have I seen a movie that disturbed me, grossed me out and left me confused, but for some reason I can't stop thinking about it. Eraserhead is both shocking and unique, as this movie drives into the mind of a man who's having a crisis rising a child that he never asked for. What David Lynch is so good at doing is making he's movies feel like a nightmare or a dream, just by how it's directed and shot creates the effect perfectly, and Eraserhead is the icing on that cake. Watched the movie twice already and after thinking about it, Eraserhead is a work of art.