NERVOUS giggles. Head scratching. A chorus of "What the hell was that about?". It must be the latest complex David Lynch movie, and it is!

Mulholland Drive is his best mind game since Blue Velvet 15 years ago, a film noir curve ball after the unexpectedly straight and narrow The Straight Story.

Like Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive is a mystery, a playing field of alternative realities where all certainties are gradually eroded and nothing is as it first seemed. In essence it is a thriller but not so much a whodunit as a sinister Who Am I, in which Lynch explores identity, and how flexible it can be in the manipulative star-making and breaking factory of Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Young blonde bubble Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has headed for the Hollywood Hills in the hope of following her aunt into the movies. Kind, ageing aunty has agreed to lend the starlet her apartment while she is away on location, but sweet Betty is surprised to find the pad already occupied by a sultry, bruised, bemused and scared young woman (Laura Elena Harring), in hiding after crawling from the wreckage of a car crash on Mulholland Drive.

Looking at a poster of Rita Hayworth, she says her name is Rita but she is suffering from amnesia, having lost all sense of identity yet still aware she is in danger. She believes the name Diane Selwyn might be significant, but doesn't know why, so Betty, in between auditions, agrees to help her solve the riddle of who she is. Somehow, everything leads to Camilla Rhodes, another name, another movie star, and by now the terrific Watts and gothic Harring are playing four roles between them, which may or may not be overlapping.

Mulholland Drive surveys Hollywood with even more disdain than Robert Altman's The Player as Lynch uses the art of illusion to execute his surreal study of Tinsel Town disillusion, portraying a dog-eat-dog world full of the lonely, the lost and those in fear of joining those ranks.

For ever turning in on itself, Mulholland Drive is a dream of a nightmare from an oblique writer-director as out to Lynch as

Updated: 09:13 Friday, January 25, 2002