Director: David Lynch
Starring: Kyle MacLachlan
Genre: Drama
Studio:   Release date: 1986   Rated: R
Language (Country): ( USA )
Summary: Blue Velvet opens with a disarmingly weird shot of blue-velvet curtains shuffling almost nervously before parting to display several loving slow-motion shots of Rockwellian Americana—bright flowers against a white picket fence, a fireman waving jovially from his truck, schoolkids marching along a crosswalk. A man watering his lawn suffers a stroke under the noonday sun, and we pan down, way down, until we see insects scurrying in a frenzy under the grass, their buzzing and clicking amplified to horrific effect. Gradually we begin to understand that something sinister is going on beneath the all-American façade. Something vaguely disturbing and somehow organically evil. This brilliant opening montage holds the whole of Blue Velvet in microcosm, the contention that beneath the surface of the American Dream festers a malevolent rash of violence and moral decay.

Written and directed by David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), Blue Velvet is a powerful and hallucinatory film that documents a young man's coming of age against a backdrop of perversion, sadomasochism, and violence. This is a film that delves into the black side of human nature in a way that few films have ever accomplished. It's a film that will stay with you—like the stuttery twitch-memories of a nightmare—long after its end credits scroll.

Kyle MacLachlan portrays Jeffrey Beaumont, a college boy called home to visit his father, who's in the hospital suffering from the opening-montage stroke. Wandering toward his childhood home from a brief and difficult visit at the hospital, Jeffrey finds a severed human ear in a field. After taking the ear to the Lumberton town detective, he finds himself irresistibly drawn into a mystery that will lead him deep into a disturbing, depraved underworld that is rendered all the more powerfully because we see only its outward effects. We see little of the undoubtedly hideous underpinnings, the fleshy machinations—we see only the anger and utter strangeness of its top couple of layers. In a key scene toward the end, we see the odd and terrible result of a scene of violence, but we don't see how it played out. The horror remains unspoken, unseen, and because of that, it lingers in your subconsciousness.

The film tells parallel love stories—one young and innocent and the other twisted and horrifying. The first, between Jeffrey and high school girl Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), is something right out of a 50s sitcom, purity and puppy love mixed with a healthy dose of boy-detective-meets-prom-queen. The second, between sadistic psychopath Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) and past-her-prime torch singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) is a study of sexual depravity and misogyny. It's when the love stories interconnect—when Jeffrey gets in over his head by peeping on the seductively horrific goings-on in Dorothy's bleak apartment—that Blue Velvet simmers with raw, exposed-nerve power.

This is a strange and unforgettable film, in which abhorrent violence and evil coexist dreamily with good old-fashioned American values and iconography, waking us up to the fact that evil has always throbbed beneath our pretty surfaces—and always will.

The performances are terrific. Hopper steals the show as Frank, roaring his way through the part in a way that will quicken your pulse. Rossellini is sad and unforgettable as Dorothy, in a humiliating role that received negative press from Roger Ebert. MacLachlan and Dern are appropriately young and naïve in their roles.

Jason Bovberg (DVDTalk.com)