Eraserhead

3.75
    Eraserhead
    1977

    Synopsis

    First time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child. David Lynch arrived on the scene in 1977, almost like a mystical UFO gracing the landscape of LA with its enigmatic radiance. His inaugural work, "Eraserhead" (1977), stood out as a cinematic anomaly, painting a surreal narrative of a young man navigating a dystopian, industrialized America, grappling not only with his tumultuous home life but also contending with an irate girlfriend and a mutant child.

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    Cast

    • Jack NanceHenry Spencer
    • Charlotte StewartMary X
    • Allen JosephMr. X
    • Jeanne BatesMrs. X
    • Judith RobertsBeautiful Girl Across the Hall
    • Laurel NearLady in the Radiator
    • Jack FiskMan in the Planet
    • Jean LangeGrandmother
    • Thomas CoulsonThe Boy
    • John MonezBum

    Recommendations

    • 100

      The A.V. Club

      See Eraserhead once and it’ll lodge itself firmly in some dank recess of your brain and refuse to vacate.
    • 100

      Empire

      Gothically shot in black and white and numerous shots that have influenced the next generation of directors, this is a classic, no matter how comfortable it is to watch.
    • 100

      Time Out

      Eraserhead is a singular work of the imagination, a harrowing, heartbreaking plunge into the darkest recesses of the soul.
    • 100

      Chicago Tribune

      What makes Eraserhead great-and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision; Lynch's complete control over this material, where, working on a shoestring, he served as director, producer, writer, editor and sound designer.
    • 100

      The Guardian

      It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.
    • 100

      RogerEbert.com

      Here was a film that took elements that one might have encountered in other movies in the past—black humor, gore, surrealism, erotic imagery, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and oddball performances—and presented them in such a unique and deeply personal manner that the end result was something that literally looked, sounded and felt like nothing that had ever come before it.
    • 100

      Slant Magazine

      Eraserhead is an extraordinarily raw film that’s not so much an announcement of its filmmaker’s obsessions, but a complete, intimate, and heartbreaking fulfillment of them.
    • 90

      The New Yorker

      The slow, strange rhythm is very unsettling and takes some getting used to, but it's an altogether amazing, sunsuous film; it even has an element of science fiction and some creepy musical numbers, and the soundtrack is as original and peculiar as the imagery.

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