Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring should be scared. Very scared.

David Lynch works hard on freaking you out. The camera is forever slowly pulling around corners. Dirty telephones next to overflowing ashtrays ring, disembodied voices give ominous answers. A decomposed body here, a trace of blood there. A found bag with mysterious objects. Trolls that live behind the diner, film execs with ridiculously high standards for espresso, satanic MCs, pasty-faced cowboys, drop-dead gorgeous lounge singers, a few midgets, kinky sex (apparently a requirement for this year's NYFF), bumbling killers, wheelchair masterminds, and creepy Midwesterners. Finally, to make certain you're sufficiently wigged out, Lynch screws up the space-time-continuum and shuffles up his characters in ever-changing constellations, "Lost Highway"-style. By the end, you don't know what the hell you just watched for the last two-and-a-half hours, but somehow it feels good.

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On the surface, "Mulholland Drive" is a neo-noir set in Los Angeles, where golden light filters through the palm trees and every girl wants to grow up to be an actress. Rita (Laura Elena Harring) may or may not be an actress - all we know is that she survived a violent car crash and lost her memory. The wide-eyed ingénue Betty (Naomi Watts) takes her in and decides to help her solve the mystery of her identity. They make good progress until Lynch decides to push the film over a surreal precipice from which it never returns. The plot, originally planned for a TV series, becomes too slippery to grasp. Instead of resolving anything, the film simply knots itself together tighter and tighter until it stops making sense.

More literal-minded souls will bristle at the fragmentation of "Mulholland Drive." It feels a bit like "Memento" would look like had Lenny suffered from acute schizophrenia rather than amnesia. I don't recommend decoding it though - I, for one, am perfectly happy with the surface of "Mulholland Drive," which is Lynch at his eerily compelling best.