Film Review: Twin Peaks — Fire Walk With Me (1992)
The date was April 8, 1990. It was a Sunday night — a school night for sixth graders at Robert Asp Elementary in Moorhead, Minnesota. Just before 8 PM, I asked my mom what we were watching on TV that night. “Twin Peaks,” she said. “A new show.” I’ll be honest, I wasn’t excited about it. A crime drama set in Washington State sounded boring to me and I was sure there was something better on that night. But it only took a few minutes for me to realize realize how wrong I was. From the moment poor old Pete Martell (Jack Nance of Eraserhead fame) found the body of Laura Palmer (a now iconic blue-skinned Sheryl Lee) on the beach, I already knew I was hooked. And that was before the rest of the lovable and enigmatic cast was introduced.
The rest of my family liked the show too, but not like me. Eventually their interest faded, neglectfully catching episodes here and there, but I kept with it as best I could. My attendance wasn’t perfect, but it was close — all the way to the fucked up finale in June of 1991. Incidentally, for all my sometimes futile attempts to see every episode as it aired, I missed the first ten minutes or so of the finale. It was the beginning of summer vacation and I’d lost track of time while at the Fargo pool with my friends. I had to race all the way to north Moorhead and I can honestly say that I’ve never ridden my bike so fast as that warm summer evening.
When it was over, I felt lost. Or perhaps more accurately, I felt unfulfilled. The way the show’s creators (David Lynch and Mark Frost — with Lynch directing the pilot and finale, not that I knew who he was back then) left things was borderline infuriating. Putting aside all the madness involving Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) and Laura in the Black Lodge for a moment (you’ll have to see for yourself — I’m not giving up anything here), I couldn’t believe what they did to my beloved Audrey Horne (played by Sherilyn Fenn, who, along with Winona Ryder, was one of the first true loves of my life). I was genuinely upset, but that’s the way TV worked back then. There was nothing I could do about it but pout and remember the very weird times.
So I sat and sulked, wondering about the fate of my beloved little town in the Pacific Northwest — for about a year. By late summer 1992, we fans had received word about a new project from Lynch and the gang: a feature film prequel, with most of the cast reprising their roles. For me, now fourteen (almost fifteen) and entering my freshman year at Moorhead Senior High School, this was the best news possible. But then I saw the movie.
It’s true that my first few screenings of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me did not go well. I was young and didn’t yet understand how David Lynch operated when freed from network television constraints and left to his own nightmarish devices. Never mind that Lara Flynn Boyle declined to return as Donna Hayward (Laura’s best friend — played in the film by Moira Kelly, who did an admirable job in retrospect), but who were all these new characters? Did we really need Agents Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) and Sam Stanley (Kiefer Sutherland), trailer park manager Carl Rodd (Harry Dean Stanton), and an eccentrically placed space/time-manipulating David Bowie as Agent Phillip Jeffries? What about the fates of Cooper and Audrey? Sheriff Truman and Hawk (Michael Ontkean and Michael Horse), or Major Briggs, Big Ed, and Norma (Don S. Davis, Everett McGill, and Peggy Lipton)? What happened after the Black Lodge and just what the hell was all that anyway? These are the questions I needed answers to, and Lynch cruelly kept them from me (until 2017, but that’s another story).
As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one disappointed in Fire Walk With Me. Critics mostly panned it and it was a bomb at the box office. Nobody seemed to like it, and it quickly faded from my mind. When I reminisced about the original show, Fire Walk With Me was not part of those fond memories.
Recently, I did a complete Twin Peaks rewatch — the entirety of the original series, The Return from 2017, and of course, Fire Walk With Me — and I’m almost ashamed to admit now that we were all dead wrong about the latter. My official stance, as of October 2026 is that Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is a damn fine marvel of horror and psychological cinema. However, there’s one thing that stood out to me that, for reasons unknown, I don’t think I noticed before about it or the original series. As astounding as Lynch’s vision is, the true hero of this once-maligned film is the terrifying and unhinged performance of the great Ray Wise.
As Leland Palmer, Wise simultaneously captures the nuance of a loving father, the unbridled evil of a serial rapist, and the heartbreaking tragedy of a victim who’s been manipulated and abused since childhood. If you’re familiar with the series (and I hope you are by now), then you already know what Leland has done and what he’d been doing for some time (and what happened to him as a result), but Fire Walk With Me revels in the shocking and graphic nature of the specifics, making it clear as day why audiences in 1992 were not quite ready for these kinds of psychological extremes. This deep dive into the nightmare of Leland and Laura’s torture at the hands of the malicious spirit known only as BOB (the late Frank A. Silva) is difficult to watch and even harder to forget once it’s been adequately absorbed into the psyche. With enough attention (something I lacked on my first few viewings), it will haunt you.
For fans looking just for the zany antics, Fire Walk With Me still has plenty of eccentricities to sink your teeth into — the scene inside the FBI office with Cooper and Phillip Jeffries comes to mind, as does the entire first thirty minutes with Agents Chester Desmond, Sam Stanley, and Gordon Cole (a personal favorite character, played hilariously by Lynch himself), as they interact with the strange dancing “Blue Rose” lady — but these relatively tame sequences do nothing to prepare you for the viciousness to come.
Yes, the weirdness of the town and its cast of kooky characters is present (thankfully the Windom Earle subplot from the show’s latter episodes is absent), but ultimately Fire Walk With Me is Leland and Laura’s story — and it’s a doozy. I’m ashamed I didn’t recognize the power of Sheryl Lee’s tormented reactions to the completely psychotic acting of Ray Wise for what it was the first time around. And I have no excuse for taking so long to come around to how genius this story and these performances are. Taking the franchise as a whole, Twin Peaks ranks among the best stories ever put to film, and Fire Walk With Me is a crucial piece of the pie.
United States, France • 1992 • 125 minutes • Color • 1.85:1 • English • Spine #898
Criterion Special Features Include
- 4K digital restoration, with 7.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, both supervised by director David Lynch
- Alternate original 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- The Missing Pieces, ninety minutes of deleted and alternate takes from the film, assembled by Lynch
- Interview by Lynch with actors Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, and Grace Zabriskie
- Interviews with Lee and composer Angelo Badalamenti
- Trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: Excerpts from an interview with Lynch from Lynch on Lynch, a 1997 book edited by filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley
