Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Rejects What You Think Twin Peaks Is Like
The critically panned prequel has deservedly earned classic status — and it has a 4K restoration to match.
A soothing waterfall, a gently humming mill, a fetching northwestern forest: these are the sights of Twin Peaks, a throwback town that disguises its mystery and selfishness under a visage of true Americana.
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s mystery series focused on the murder of popular but troubled high schooler Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), with the intrepid, boyish FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) discovering a nest of demonic spirits implicated in her death. For years, the prequel film that followed up the series’ cancellation was reviled by critics and fans — now it’s honored with a Criterion Collection 4K upgrade. It’s the perfect time to revisit one of the late director’s best films, even if the film won’t let you revisit Twin Peaks.
How was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me received on first release?
Few films have received a more seismic reappraisal since release than Twin Peak: Fire Walk With Me. The film premiered at Cannes in 1992 to negative reviews (and reported boos), following two years of Twin Peaks mania and disillusionment: a smash-hit pilot led to a dishonorable cancellation only 30 episodes later in 1991. Many critics hated it, Quentin Tarantino gave it one of his least defensible takedowns, and it was rare to see a positive review that also called out the strange hostility that the film was receiving.
The film’s reputation improved in the ‘90s, and a combination of filmmakers going to bat for it, the spread of online criticism and retrospective screenings, and the clear impact of Twin Peaks across the television media in the 21st century has improved Fire Walk With Me’s critical standing — not to mention the countless voices who have testified to the film’s enduring empathy for survivors of sexual abuse since 1992.
Why is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me important to watch now?
Laura Palmer’s side of the story was bleaker and more upsetting than the show had ever been.
After Laura Palmer’s murder was solved partway into Season 2, Twin Peaks quickly lost control. Episodes would be driven by inconsequential plot, the comedy felt desperate and the intrigue lacked any of the bite that the Palmer case had in spades. The show had quickly become an expensive soap opera, the type of daytime programming that Twin Peaks cannily pastiched alongside its dark, spiritual imagery. Even though the final episodes resurrected some bleak and spellbinding energy, the finale’s cliffhanger was too dramatic to not resolve — Dale Cooper returned from the Black Lodge possessed by the demonic Killer BOB (Frank Silva).
But Fire Walk With Me is not a stand-in for Twin Peaks season 3. It’s a prequel, but shot without the warm, fuzzy hues of the show, devoid of the scintillating pleasure of watching installments in melodrama or mystery TV shows. It is about the suffering Laura felt as she learns the identity of her killer, and her inability to communicate to her friends, family, and lovers how lonely and vulnerable her life has become.
Contemporary fans didn’t just want more Twin Peaks adventures, they wanted a return to form for a series that had gone awry. But the first act of Fire Walk With Me lays down its thesis: a shot of an axe taking out a TV set, followed by an isolated mini-story of FBI Agent Chester Desmond (Chris Isaak) — who has much more edge than his dreamy colleague Agent Cooper — investigating the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) in Deer Meadow, Washington. This is, like Twin Peaks, a small northwestern town affected by the murder of a young woman — there is even a sheriff’s department and local diner — but the townspeople are cruel and rude, and unlike Laura, the mystified homecoming queen, Teresa is dismissed as a drug-addict drifter. Even stranger, Agent Desmond quickly vanishes inside the town after touching a discarded ring from the Black Lodge. The vibes are off — we are led back towards the borders of Twin Peaks by seeing its joyless, anxiety-inducing doppelganger.
This subversion does not let up once we get to Laura’s story. In her final days on earth, Laura chases self-destruction, experiences agonizing paranoia and trauma, and realizes her abuser is her father, Leland (Ray Wise). Far from summoning the whimsy that defined the glory days of the series (even the darker, seedier characters and plotlines of the show were tinged with a soapiness that softened their nasty edge), the road to Laura’s death is full of danger and isolation, shot with brilliant, unnerving power by a director who would develop this more immediate and overwhelming style going forward.
Lynch is responding to a desire to return to an aesthetic safety; as he would later double-down on in 2017’s revival Twin Peaks: The Return, Twin Peaks is not somewhere we can actually return to outside of those 30 original episodes. Even if we visit a time period set chronologically before the pilot, Fire Walk With Me makes us question if the pleasure of Twin Peaks was ever truly substantial — as if only by mimicking the form and rhythms of a TV soap could it disguise how painful it was to be trapped there. Maybe as audiences, we had let ourselves be tricked.
What new features does the Blu-ray have?
At first critically reviled, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is now considered a bonafide classic.
The Criterion Collection is the closest thing physical media has to an official film canon, and the New York distributor had already released a Criterion edition of Fire Walk With Me featuring original, gorgeous cover art — a specialty of the label. Criterion’s 4K restoration and audio remaster is director-approved, which means David Lynch supervised the upgrade before his passing earlier in January 2025.
Only the film has been upgraded to 4K, and the special features remain in HD on a separate Blu-ray disc. It’s here you can watch The Missing Pieces, a 90-minute compilation of the deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me, which should satiate anyone after more hijinks and intrigue from the characters they recognize from the series, but also less truncated versions of scenes from the finished film.
