Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

★★★★
One of the television show's enduring images is that of Laura Palmer's reveal. We see it first within minutes of the premiere episode of Twin Peaks, and we see it again towards the end of David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. It is heartbreaking. Those eyelids and her melancholy posture suggest the saddest of stories. Even as motionless Laura Palmer, Sheryl Lee was still acting. She conveyed emotion with a slight tilt of her head and that sorrowful frown. Hers was a life that ended horrifically when it should have been glorious. Blue Velvet opened with an immediate warning signal—that of burrowing ants—to suggest the horrors to come in a town of picturesque neighborhoods complete with white picket fences. Now imagine Blue Velvet was itself only the surface, and there exists a small town with even darker forces at work. Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth was an evil character, but the antagonist in Fire Walk with Me is a force of nature that feeds off suffering.