Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
Splintering of subjectivity, agonising uncertainty of identity, crushing doubt. In the first half is clarity, coherence, what seems to be reality. But this all dissolves into the nightmare of the waking world, the sheer horror of psychic instability, a dark and bleak world of a woman suffocated by the sense of her own crushing failure, her rupturing, breaking self against the poisonous accomplishments of others. Hers is an envy that is insurmountable, and it appears that this is what prompts the dislocation of her tragically out of reach dream. And when we are finally aware of the rupture of this dream, what the carefully imagined world disintegrates into is a hellish reality in which she is alone, festering in shame and envy, cowering beneath the mockery of others, the laughter of the immortals, crushed by her own delusions, poisonous fantasies.
Madness, failure, passionate striving to surpass the tragedy of her reality. The cowboy asks whether it is a person’s attitude that determines the way they move forward in life and here we see play out before us the self-sabotaging attitude of an utter denial of reality, a submersion into fantasy, a retreat into the ideal. Lynch’s creation is an interrogation of truth, truth as it is known under the human condition, one’s temptation to manipulate it, to beat and pummel it into something worthy of living. It seems to me that his message is of its profound fragility— that truth is inconceivably malleable, a delicate thing. Too delicate, dangerously so. The film is permeated with this sense of crushing doubt, of torturous uncertainty. But whether this doubt derives from the exterior world, or from somewhere within remains to be seen. Does everyone have a role, a part to play? Or do some merely flit across the scene in an intensification of this crushing confusion, and this is wherein their only role lies. The world crafted here is nightmarish, phantasmagorical, twisted and confused. It seems that Lynch’s creation will inevitably translate differently for each perceiver, just as our own worlds do to those outside it. After all, the mind of another is an unknowable thing.