Christopher B
A very early and disturbing 34 minute piece on family life as a surrealist nightmare. Live footage is blended with transitional crudely constructed animation that advances the bizzare and very surreal narrative. This being said, it focuses more on the creepy visuals and very simplistic and terrifying soundtrack to accomplish it's atmosphere. Very early work that you can see the latter Eraserhead being constructed from.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
11/29/22
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Audience Member
Any single second of this film's cinematography is immediately recognizable as the work of the creative mind of David Lynch.
However, it is like watching a nightmare: odd, disturbing, pointless. It is ostensibly about an abused child who grows a grandmother so he can have a comforting
presence in his dysfunctional family. The entire 33 minutes is an exercise in visual and aural ugliness. Everyone is in white makeup; the boy is formally dressed resembling Emcee in Cabaret. When the family sits down to eat, plastic bags of bread are strewn on the table, an unlit electric lamp takes up most of the tablespace (candles may have looked too pretty). Any furniture visible in the stark high contrast cinematography is thrift-store trash.
Although it has sound, it is mostly atonal noise and shrieks. Although it is a live-action film, there is animation (more ugliness); although it is in black and white, there are colors, the most pronounced being dark yellow urine stains. (This poor kid must need a urologist.) Urine in this movie is about as profuse as blood is in The Shining.
The grandmother who grows quickly out of a bulb, smiles sometimes, but since that is about it for her as a contrast to the shouting monosyllabic parents, she isn't that much of a comfort. She mostly lies in her bed of dirt--but isn't that the same bed the boy wets all the time? Oh, well, dreams don't have to make sense.
The surreal look is peppered with stop-motion cinematography, so Lynchian. But it is only "enjoyable" as an example of his style. This is to be seen by film-students, not audiences seeking escapism. The reaction is meant to be less "Hooray for Hollywood" and more "WTF!"
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/30/23
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Audience Member
Amazing 33 minutes of film. utterly disturbing, like Lynch has managed to film someones bad dream
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
04/26/20
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william k
Told without dialogue, but with an elaborate soundtrack, combining animation and staged scenes, this David Lynch short tells a surreal story, many moments suggesting his later feature Eraserhead.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
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Audience Member
When setting my DVR for the week and seeing what was playing on TCM Underground, the description for this film, that a boy plants a seed to grow a grandmother, sounded so bizarre I HAD to record it. Watching the film, it's was even stranger than I expected, with a wordless story (the characters do grunt and vocalize), where all the characters in white face paint, filmed on sparsely decorated sets against a black background, and set to an unsettling score made up of what seems to be industrial noises (by a band named Tractor). While watching "The Grandmother," my impression was this seems like a bad version of "Eraserhead," but when the credits rolled I saw that this was in fact written and directed by David Lynch! This short film predates "Eraserhead" and if very amateurish in comparison. I'm a huge David Lynch fan, but "The Grandmother" felt more like a pretentious film major final project than a polished piece of filmmaking, instead brimming with self important, heavy-handed symbolism, amateurish acting, and poor photography. However, even in this primitive state, the visuals are unmistakably Lynchian, filling mundane settings with the surreal, a penchant for the grotesque (the boy stroking the growing grandmother is quite off-putting), and a very precise color palette. You can also sense Lynch's dark humor, although, like many of his earlier films, it's purposefully challenging and hard to watch. So to be sure, this is probably the worst David Lynch film I'd seen (until I watched "The Amputee" right after), but it's still interesting, if at the same time is annoyingly self important.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
pointless. Don't waste your time
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
Full Review
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