The spinelessness of our culture is breathtaking. We’re happy to call someone a genius, and to celebrate that genius when all it means is some kind of kooky eccentricity that won’t get in the way of whatever else we’re doing. But when that genius insists on its own dark audacity, when it not only overstays its welcome but moves in with all its bizarre habits, then we smuggle the new movie through town in the dead of night like transporting radioactive waste to the nuclear dump, because whatever else we want from our culture, we don’t want consequences. It’s one thing to reject Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me because we don’t want this film inside our heads — that’s an honest, perhaps even healthy reaction — but it’s another to pretend that Lynch has somehow betrayed us or himself when in fact he’s done neither, when in fact of all of his films this may be the one where he pursues farther than ever before what he’s about as an artist. Whatever else is true of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, people are ultimately appalled not by its badness but its integrity; in the theater I could feel everyone around me pulling away from the movie and I knew why, because I wanted to get away from it as well. You can feel the industry and the critics and the audience all breathe a sigh of conspiratorial relief that we’ve got that guy out of our hair once and for all; we might even feel gratitude for how he played into our hands, if we weren’t so busy slapping him down with them. Ultimately we may decide that Lynch is too uncontrolled or puerile or sick to deal with, but let’s not pretend he didn’t give us fair warning or that the failure of nerves is anyone’s but our own. In the end Twin Peaks, both the TV series and the movie, is the work of David Lynch’s life not because it’s a solemn act of artistic maturity but because it’s the wild magnum opus of a primal adolescence that none of us outgrows, and we hate him for that, Time cover or no. We hate him not only for how he’s kept his end of the bargain but for how we’ve failed to keep ours — how, moreover, we deliberately chose to misunderstand the bargain all along.
— Steve Erickson (LA Weekly
In the questionable town of Deer Meadow, Washington, FBI Agent Desmond inexplicably disappears while hunting for the man who murdered a teen girl. The killer is never apprehended, and, after experiencing dark visions and supernatural encounters, Agent Dale Cooper chillingly predicts that the culprit will claim another life. Meanwhile, in the more cozy town of Twin Peaks, hedonistic beauty Laura Palmer hangs with lowlifes and seems destined for a grisly fate.