Parky at the Pictures (DVD 14/9/2017)

Such is the current reverence for the plot twist that a growing number of film reviews (particularly online) tiptoe around story arcs for fear of incurring the wrath of readers who want to watch a movie without prior knowledge. By withholding information in such a manner, however, a critic can only do a fraction of their job, as they are only able to offer opinions on the action and how it has been presented up to the first significant kink in the storyline. This approach is rendered ridiculous by items like Gareth Tunley's directorial debut, The Ghoul, as the whole point of the picture is that it can be interpreted in at least two ways and it seems fatuous to appraise only one in order to appease those who, frankly, should avoid pre-screening reviews if they are so easily outraged by anything that might ruin their hermitic enjoyment.

Returning to London along the North Circular Road, Tom Meeten hooks up with cop pal Dan Renton Skinner to survey the hallway of an unremarkable suburban house in which an elderly couple had managed to keep moving towards their assailant in spite of being shot three times each. Following a troubled night's sleep, Meeten concludes that property manager Rufus Jones has something to do with the murder and his hunch seems well founded when Skinner discovers that he has disappeared. He has, however, been consulting psychiatrist Niamh Cusack and Meeten decides to pose as a potential client in the hope of gaining access to her filing cabinet.

Meeten explains the case to profiler Alice Lowe, who suggests that Jones might be a ghoul with an unhealthy obsession with crime scenes. She urges Meeten to back away and go back north, but he is determined to pursue his line of inquiry. And here is where the anti-spoilerists would draw a red line in the narrative sand, as, from hereon in, the viewer is forced to make a judgement about Meeten's own psychological state. Is he really a maverick copper going undercover in search of clues or is he really the ghoul, who exploits his friendships with Skinner and Lowe to live a fantasy life that is somewhat detached from reality?

Lowe suggests a depressive condition that Meeten could feign in order to intrigue Cusack and the action cross-cuts between Lowe's pep talk and the session in Cusack's sparsely furnished office. But, the fact that Lowe confides a post-coital regret that Meeten has returned to London should alert the audience to the fact that he is either trouble or troubled. Lowe even calls Cusack to lure her out of the consulting room and allow Meeten (who is wearing a wire) time to photograph Jones's case notes. Yet, as they read about her misgivings about his bipolar tendencies, Lowe teases Meeten about pots and kettles and notes that Cusack is considering referring Jones to her mentor, Geoffrey McGivern.

At their next meeting, Cusack asks Meeten to describe a typical day and we see him wandering the streets in a rundown area near the tower block in which he lives. As darkness falls, he seems to stare up at Lowe's window and returns to his flat in a state of frustration. But is this montage a true reflection of his daily routine or what he has told Cusack to keep up the pretence for over a month (which seems superfluous now that he has obtained the confidential information on Jones)? Eager to make progress, Cusack asks Meeten to let his guard down and he tells her about Lowe and how they met while students at Manchester University and how she is now dating his friend, Skinner.

Suddenly, Metten seems vulnerable and starts to look a little dishevelled. He is slapped on the face by neighbour James Eyres Kenward when they meet on the staircase and he shovels noodles into his mouth from a pan, as he huddles on his bed. He also gets a visit from Skinner (a rep for a drinks company rather than a cop), who gives him a bottle of vodka and urges him to find a reason to get up in the morning. Standing in the doorway of the whiffy apartment, Skinner admits that he and Lowe have had a few problems, but that they are happy enough and suggests that Meeten finds himself a bad woman to perk himself up.

During his next session with Cusack, Meeten confesses that he daydreams about being a detective who has been thrown off the force after taking the blame for something he didn't do. He imagines that he still solves crimes when he is actually signing on between bits-and-pieces jobs and that Lowe (who is really a teacher) is a psychological profiler who helps him crack the case. In fact, when he bumps into Lowe in the park, he becomes so tongue-tied that he returns to his tiny bedsit to kick the wall in anguish. The surprise on Lowe's face when she spots him by the pond suggests that the previous meeting about infiltrating Cusack's surgery was a figment of Meeten's imagination and also casts doubt over his visit to the scene of the pensioner shooting. But Tunley has no intention of letting the audience know which scenes are `real' and which are taking place in the overactive imagination of his abject anti-hero.

Despite insisting that he knows his lawman persona is a sham, Meeten still follows Jones when he runs into him at Cusack's. However, he makes such a cack-handed job of it that Jones confronts him and forces him to buy coffee to atone for stalking him. He mentions McGivern and, curiously, Meeten finds himself being transferred to him when Cusack announces she needs urgent treatment for a serious medical condition. Even more eerily, McGivern has the same front door as the crime house and Meeten is slightly taken aback by his new shrink's chatty geniality and the amount of fantastical paraphernalia around his upstairs room.

Jones is also intrigued and invites Meeten to a party, where a dreadlocked Paul Kaye tells a rambling story about drug-dealing and the power of prayer. While under the influence, Meeten gets spooked by a conversation about whether he really is an undercover cop and has had his mind messed around so much that he doubts his true identity. A befuddling montage of road signs, flashing lights, hurtling trains and blurred close-ups in murky reddish light convey Meeten's sense of disorientation. He wakes the next morning in the bed of Rachel Stubbings, who brings him toast and gives him her number. But he has no idea how they hooked up.

At his next session with McGivern, Meeten asks about the Klein bottle on a shelf and he explains that, as a closed manifold with a non-orientable surface, it has no inside or outside. He compares it to a Möbius strip and uses a piece of torn paper to show how an ant would follow it and return to the same spot without ever crossing an edge or turning back on itself. McGivern admits to finding magick a useful tool and points out the sigil design on the wall that he created in the middle of a health scare a decade ago.

Ignoring messages from Jones to stay away from McGivern (and the fact that his new friend seems to have vanished), Meeten takes the train into the sticks and McGivern takes him to the local woods to declare one clearing to be the centre of the area's occult activity. As Meeten becomes more morose, he peeps on Lowe near her home and wanders the streets with no destination in mind. He questions McGivern's suggestion to give his clinical depression a name so that he can approach it from a new angle. When he finally opts to call it The Ghoul, McGivern reminds him that it has tried and failed to conquer him for many years and he implores Meeten not to give up the battle.

He attempts to draw his own sigil sign and is amazed when Lowe calls him the next day. She is upset because Skinner has cheated on her and Meeten is pleased that she considered him her shoulder to cry on. A meeting with Jones proves less enjoyable, however, as he has covered his wall with scribbled notes and he tries to convince Meeten that Cusack and McGivern are gods who are playing with them for their sport. It comes as a relief, therefore, when Lowe invites him over again and they reminisce about their student days before Meeten pleads with her not to leave London, as he needs her.

McGivern is pleased with Meeten's progress. But he warns him to stay away from Jones, as he fears he will try to manipulate his mind. Confused when Jones insists that McGivern is the dangerous character, Meeten feels abandoned when McGivern announces that he is going to take some time off to nurse a friend suffering from cancer. Worse follows when Lowe apologises for leading him on and Meeten gets drunk in his room as he strives to make sense of what is happening to him. Staring at the ceiling, he gets a vision of Jones's noticeboard, while the voices he hears while playing back his taped therapy sessions convince him that he has to act.

Acquiring a gun and distressed by the news that Lowe and Skinner are moving up north, Meeten breaks into McGivern's house with his mind repeating the exhortation to `use the loop'. Leaving Cusack in bed, McGivern comes downstairs to investigate the noise and tries to calm Meeten down as he points the gun at him. Cusack emerges on the stairs and Meeten begins to panic, as the pair seem to taunt him, even though he fires at them. Running out of the door, Meeten gets into his car and drives north at a breakneck speed until he crashes. Or does he, as the picture ends with him on the same road heading back towards London, as he was in the opening scene?

Toying obfuscatorily with the audience in much the same way that David Lynch often does and that Omer Fast did in his feature debut, Remainder (2015), Tunley makes an accomplished start as a writer-director after previously having acted in features like executive producer Ben Wheatley's Down Terrace (2009) and Kill List (2011). Indeed, the stamp of the Ealing Live comedy platform is as evident on this head-scratcher as it was on Steve Oram's Aaaaaaaah! (2015) and Alice Lowe's Prevenge (2016). But, while there's something undeniably incestuous about this offbeat cabal, its members are nowhere near as smug as those who formed Natural Nylon in the late 1990s.

Tom Meeten certainly allows himself no airs and graces, as he plumbs the depths of despair while being buffeted by just about everyone he meets. Yet, we get to know little about his past or the reasons for his decision to come south after such a prolonged period. But Tunley is careful not to leak too much tangible information, as this would limit his ability to yank the audience's chain at whim (which he does to decent effect without quite exhausting its patience). He is capably abetted in this regard by Benjamin Pritchard's skittish visuals, co-editor Robin Hills's slickly controlled assembly and Waen Shepherd's pulsatingly unsettling score. But Meeten is clearly the most crucial conspirator, as he plays each scene with a naturalistic immediacy that enables Tunley to conceal his hand past the closing credits.

According to movie lore, it's rarely a good idea to let someone who has originated a character on stage reprise the role on the big screen. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, Broadway icons like Ethel Merman were invariably overlooked when it came to casting the film versions of their triumphs, as they were perceived to lack the looks and/or presence necessary to succeed in pictures. However, the producers of Joe Stephenson's debut feature, Chicken, have made the right decision in sticking with Scott Chambers, who headlined Freddie Machin's play when it played on the London fringe in 2011, as the 25 year-old effortlessly sheds a decade to convince in a performance that has drawn the highest praise from no less a light than Sir Ian McKellen.

Estranged from their mother, 15 year-old Scott Chambers and older brother Morgan Watkins live in a rickety caravan on a hill overlooking a Norfolk farmhouse. They steal electricity from the house, which has been empty for some time. However, times are tough for the siblings, as Chambers suffers from learning difficulties, while Watkins drinks away the pittance he earns stripping wires at Freddie Machin's scrap yard. Despite his perpetual scowl, Chambers is devoted to Watkins and tries his best to find food from neighbouring properties. However, his trick of bouncing a golf ball into a farmyard doesn't always give him a convincing alibi and he is chased across the fields by a farmer who catches him trying to purloin a freshly slaughtered pig.

While Watkins is drunkenly hitting on barmaid Gina Bramhill, Chambers fusses over his pet chicken, Fiona. She lives in a little run beside the caravan and Chambers carries her with him wherever he goes, including the nearby barn, where he has created a bizarre domestic scene using roadkill animals. However, his idyll is threatened when Watkins loses his job for trying to steal Machin's motorbike and their electricity supply is cut off when 17 year-old Yasmin Paige moves into the farm with her parents, Stuart Keil and Kirsty Besterman.

Watkins convinces Chambers that he has punched Keil in the nose in refusing to leave the caravan. But he hooks up with snack bar owner Adrian Bouchet, who offers him a job to flip burgers at fairgrounds alongside girlfriend Rose Williams. Seeking to impress her, he orders Chambers to steal the bike from Machin. But he misunderstands and Watkins beats Chambers up when he returns with a push-bike. Having forged an unlikely bond with Chambers (despite thoughtlessly calling him a `freak'), Paige tends to his cuts and bruises when he comes to the house and Besterman is pleased she has found a friend.

However, Chambers is inconsolable when a fox kills Fiona and Watkins announces that he is leaving without his brother. When Chambers asks why they can't go and live with their mother, Watkins reveals that she was a drunken monster who forced herself upon him nine months before Chambers was born. Paige offers Chambers a job as a farmhand and he gratefully accepts. But, while she is finding him some bedding to spend the night in the big house, he rushes across the fields to set light to the caravan. The pair watch as it disintegrates in the flames and Chambers hopes he can make a fresh start.

In adapting Machin's play for the screen, Weekend actor Chris New affords Stephenson and cinematographer Eben Bolter plentiful opportunity to make the most of the verdant Norfolk countryside. But the clumsier narrative elements remain (including the Jeremy Kyle-like revelation about Chambers's paternity), while the dialogue occasionally rings hollow. This puts a strain on the weaker members of the cast (whose roles are little more than walk-on ciphers) and exposes Stephenson's uncertain handling of the tonal transitions.

The opening sequences are particularly scrappy and Stephenson (who has made a couple of programmes for Sky since being acclaimed for his 2009 short, The Alchemistic Suitcase) never fully persuades the audience that a spoilt city girl like Paige would become so readily attached to a misfit like Chambers. However, their conversation by the woodland stream is quietly affecting and Chambers so inhabits his role that he pulls his co-stars along with him. Watkins also does well as an inarticulate thug who has reached the end of his rope and, while he is very much the villain of the piece, Stephenson never entirely demonises him, as he has stuck by his sibling/son for so long. Chambers will rightly get the plaudits, but Stephenson has seemingly already reaped the benefits, as he will next direct Ian McKellen and Vanessa Redgrave in a biopic of Noël Coward.

Actor Alex Lawther has made a name for himself playing real-life characters since coming to prominence at 17 in David Hare's autobiographical play, South Downs (2011). But, having impressed as the school-age musical prodigy in Tom Britten's Benjamin Britten: Peace and Conflict (2013) and the young Alan Turing in Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game (2014), Lawther struggles to get inside the mind of the fictional hero of Andrew Steggall's feature bow, Departure. He's not helped by the glacial pacing of a slight story that is stretched far too thinly over 109 minutes. But, in playing a simpering adolescent coming to terms with his sexuality as his parents edge inexorably closer to divorce, Lawther is consistently caught out by the proximity of a camera that magnifies every seemingly subtle gesture and expression. By contrast, Juliet Stevenson gives a masterclass in screen restraint that has the unfortunate effect of exposing the shortcomings of her co-stars.

While driving to their holiday home in Languedoc, 15 year-old Alex Lawther accuses mother Juliet Stevenson of hitting a deer in the darkness. They have come to clear out the property prior to its sale and Lawther resents not having been allowed to stay at home with father Finbar Lynch. At the first opportunity, therefore. he slips away and watches admiringly as Phénix Brossard strips down to his underwear to go swimming in the nearby reservoir. Wandering into the village, Lawther (who always wears a vintage army tunic) sits in the corner of a café and scribbles poetry in a notebook. Patron Patrice Juiff chats to him about his time as an actor and wishes Lawther well in his ambition to become a writer.

On his way home, Lawther sees the bilingual Brossard working on an old motorbike in a garage and invites him to come to the house the following day to help with the packing. Stevenson is surprised to see that her reticent son has made a friend and offers them hot chocolate while they carry furniture into the yard. Lawther shows Brossard a broken-down truck in the woods and chokes on his first cigarette, as they sit in the cab. Brossard mocks him for being a poetic cliché and Lawther half protests at the accusation he is gay by reeling off a list of famous French authors who were homosexual. Brossard gives a Gallic shrug and wanders off.

Feeling alone and obviously upset at having to leave her bolthole, Stevenson bursts into tears at the municipal dump. She also snaps at Lawther when she smells the smoke on his jacket when she stops to give him a lift. But she apologises later that night when she hears him tiptoeing past her bedroom door. He claims he is popping down for a midnight snack, but he is really fetching a carrot from the fridge to perform a sexual experiment. Pleased by the sensation, Lawther disposes of the carrot in the bathroom bin and sleeps late the next morning.

By the time he wakes, Brossard has arrived and Lawther is jealous when he sees him chatting to Stevenson. They go back to the truck, where Brossard reveals that his mother is dying of cancer back in Paris and that he has been sent to stay with an aunt after assaulting a member of the hospital staff for failing to cure her. When Lawther pats his hand in sympathy, Brossard noisily pretends to be speeding along in the truck before pushing Lawther away for trying to exploit his distress.

Back at the house, Stevenson receives a visit from Irish neighbour Niamh Cusack. She apologises for not having been very sociable over the years and laments that she has always had life-changing decisions made for her, ever since her parents made her give away her first baby. Cusack leaves her to her misery, as Lawther tries to reassure Brossard that he just wants to be his friend. He calls out that he loves him in French and, when Brossard corrects his use of the word `aimer', he grasps a nettle and relishes the stinging sensation.

That night, Brossard comes to supper and Lawther is surprised when he wanders into the bathroom while he is in the tub. He gets a chair to catch a moth that has flown up to the light fitting and Lawther is confused by his friend's mixed messages. Stevenson gets tipsy on a bottle of Lynch's most expensive wine and Lawther gets embarrassed when she talks about sex and even makes a joke about him not finishing his meal when she thought he was so partial to carrots.

Feeling the need to escape, Stevenson suggests an outing to Lagrasse. Once again, however, Lawther is mortified by her flirtatious attitude towards Brossard and is appalled to see them kissing under the bridge after he has hung back to steal a book from a shop on the square. But Stevenson has shocked herself and, while driving back to the house after collecting Lynch from the airport, she asks to be let out of the car so she can go for a walk by herself. Lawther is too wrapped up in his own thoughts to realise something is amiss and fails to read between the lines when Lynch tries to apologise to him for the fact that his mother is so unhappy.

The next day, Lawther and Brossard take a rowing boat on to the reservoir and the latter goes skinny dipping. Lawther becomes concerned when Brossard fails to surface and tries to stay angry with him when he laughs off his fears. However, Brossard lies back naked in the boat and makes no attempt to stop Lawther when he brings him to orgasm. In the afterglow, Lawther confides a story about Stevenson burning her hand on a hot tap when he was a boy and how he knew in that moment that something had changed that could never be recaptured.

He arrives home to find Stevenson and Lynch arguing over a broken wine glass and his inability to tell her the truth. Slinking upstairs, Lawther sits on his bed and (to the accompaniment of Jools Scott's tinkly piano score), he stares into space as CGI leaves fall around him. As he sleeps in next morning, Stevenson runs Lynch to the airport. Fighting back the tears, she says is no longer prepared to watch him ogle waiters in restaurants and returns home to start burning his furniture.

Lawther chides his mother for torching his memories and she accuses him of being self-obsessed. They tussle while arguing over Brossard and Stevenson is hurt when Lawther stalks off to find the injured deer. He strides across the fields and Brossard catches up with him to inform him that he is going back to Paris. They start fighting. But, as they roll in the dust, they kiss before Brossard marches off. Lawther goes to the reservoir and jumps into the water naked. The camera follows in slow-motion, as he holds his breath in the dark blue depths to the strains of an aria from Antonin Dvorak's water sprite opera, Rusalka. As he returns to the house, he finds Stevenson waiting for him in the rain.

Bearing an uncanny resemblance to a young James Stewart, Lawther never quite comes to terms with the demands of a difficult role that requires him to be as insufferable as he is sympathetic. His aesthetic affectations and disdain for his mother make him eminently resistible, as do his attempts to take advantage of Brossard's vulnerability to satisfy his own curiosity and lust. Yet, while he sometimes stumbles over the cumbersome dialogue, Lawther mostly conveys the emotional immaturity that justify his often selfish actions.

Less is required of the enigmatic Brossard and the needlessly chauvinist Lynch, whose caricaturistics epitomise the flaws in Steggall's screenplay. He also overdoes the aquatic symbolism and too often mistakes torpor for dramatic earnestness and significance. The sequence with the falling leaves, for example, is a major miscalculation, while the cathartic underwater finale feels equally contrived. The inclusion of a mournful ballad by singer-songwriter Oliver Daldry also feels de trop. Moreover, Steggall has cinematographer Brian Fawcett produce too many chocolate box vistas in the same way that Virginia Gilbert and Ed Rutherford fetishised southern France in another study of foolish obsession, A Long Way From Home (2013).

The saving grace, however, is Stevenson. She gets to sob (albeit not as gushingly as she did in Anthony Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply, 1990) and shifts delicately between being a humiliated wife, an over-protective mother and an inexpert cougar. Moreover, she brings a humanity to poorly judged scenes like her throwaway encounter with Cusack, which exists solely for a revelation that is even more convoluted than Lawther's post-coital anecdote about the scalding tap. But even she struggles during the laborious exchanges with Lynch, which emphasise Steggall's difficulties with characterisation and contextualising the action on screen. Yet, despite its surfeit of precious melodrama, this has its moments and offers more acute insights into the egotism and insensitivity of the average teenager than a dozen American high-school movies.

The reissue of Mulholland Drive (2001) and the revival of Twin Peaks has put David Lynch back in the media spotlight. Indeed, such has been the level of interest that two documentaries have been made about the engagingly quirky film-maker. That said, neither Peter Braatz's Blue Velvet Revisited nor Jon Nguyen's David Lynch: The Art Life can be said to be breaking new ground, as they follow in the wake of Toby Keeler's Pretty As a Picture: The Art of David Lynch (1997) and Jeffrey Schwarz's Mysteries of Love: The Making of Blue Velvet (2002). Moreover, Nguyen has been down this route before, as he had teamed in 2007 with producer Jason S on Lynch, a record of the production of Inland Empire that listed `blackANDwhite' as its director.

Given that Lynch has also shared many of his best anecdotes with Chris Rodley for the seminal tome, Lynch on Lynch (1997), there doesn't appear to be much that fans don't already know about one of the icons of American independent cinema. But Nguyen is clearly an insider with sufficient clout to persuade the 70 year-old to tell the familiar tales one more time, while pootling around his art studio in the Hollywood Hills. The absence of any outside, let alone any dissenting voices, means that this is very much a work of unquestioning admiration. Yet Lynch is such an offbeat raconteur that this highly selective trip down memory lane - which has been compiled from over 20 recordings made over three years - is rarely anything less than a diverting pleasure.

Born in Missoula, Montana on 20 January 1946, David Lynch and his brother John and sister Martha were raised with a decent degree of freedom by parents Donald and Martha, who never had a cross word for each other. Painting with his young daughter Lula mooching around behind him, Lynch recalls mud holes in Sandpoint, Idaho and playing war with his friends. He also remembers seeing a naked woman with a possibly bloodied mouth sitting down on the kerb while he was waiting for his father to call him in to bed. Nguyen accompanies the recollection with ethereal images created by Lynch that seem to have been influenced by the experience. But, when Lynch goes to tell a story about taking leave of neighbours called the Smiths, he breaks off abruptly.

If Boise was sunshine, Alexandria, Virginia felt like constant darkness, as Lynch fell in with a bad crowd at school and Nguyen uses a montage of menacing monochrome drawings to suggest his subject's mindset. Hating school and feeling guilty at letting his mother down, Lynch found solace in partying and fantastical dreams. But a visit to the studio of Bushnell Keeler convinced Lynch that he wanted to become an artist and Nguyen uses a grainy monochrome look to suggest the art laboratory vibe that Lynch experienced in Keeler's cluttered space. Robert Henri's book, The Art Spirit, also proved a major influence, as Lynch decided that coffee, cigarettes and maybe girls were the perfect accoutrements to `the art life'.

Picking up a sense of experimentation and problem solving from his scientist father, Lynch was encouraged to try his hand at art and began sharing a studio with Jack Fisk, who was a soda jerk at the pharmacy where Lynch worked as a delivery boy to pay the rent on his corner of Keeler's studio. Donald needed convincing that this was the best direction for his son, but Lynch recalls him being a fair-minded man who always met him halfway. He also admits to keeping his friends away from the house and living three different lives in the 10th grade, as he juggled family stuff with painting and wilder nights in Washington, DC with his pals and girlfriend. But, on moving to Boston for art school, Lynch found himself stricken with a homesick form of agoraphobia that kept him huddled in his new digs with only a radio for company for a fortnight before term started. Needing a roommate, he shared with Peter Wolf, who would find fame with The J. Geils Band. Lynch smoked his first joint on a road trip to New York with him. But they fell out after Lynch stormed out of a Bob Dylan concert because he was so disappointed at how small he seemed from the rear of the auditorium. Feeling he was wasting his time at Boston Museum, Lynch quit and planned to spend three years with Fisk studying under Oskar Kokoschka in Saltzburg. However, they returned after 15 days when he proved not to be available and he eventually enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts after Keeler wrote a secret letter of recommendation. Not that he liked Philadephia, however, and he reminisces about neighbourhood women who variously smelt of urine, clucked like chickens and warned their children against growing up like him. Distorted images of the female form accompany these unflattering remarks, as he describes the mood of fear and racial hatred that permeated the city. Yet, the combination of social unease and student camaraderie helped spark the vein of creativity that would set Lynch on the path to film-making and fame.

Following a sequence of brooding black-and-white images of rundown industrial sites, Lynch reveals how a painting of some green leaves coming out of a black background made him wonder about producing moving paintings with sound. A scratchy clip follows from an untitled early effort at film-making before Lynch recalls a midnight trip to the morgue and being struck by the fact that everyone in cold storage had a story to tell. A rapid montage of collage paintings follows. The subject matter would appear to be left-field, but Nguyen opts not to dwell on the images and Lynch offers no insight into their origins, making or meaning. All of which rather sums up the more frustrating aspect of this profile, as so much is being tantalisingly offered for scrutiny, only for it to be whisked away from view before its import can be gauged.

Wordlessly busy, Lynch continues to work on another project involving sticky substances while his voiceover regales us with the story of his father urging him in 1967 never to have children after he was given a guided tour of a basement full of decaying experiments. Ironically, his girlfriend Peggy Reavey was already pregnant with their daughter, Jennifer. We see bathtime home movies, as Lynch remembers messing up a reel containing 100ft of painstakingly produced animation for a live-action split-screen short. Bouncing back from his disappointment, he made The Alphabet (1968), which is shown in part as Lynch asserts that it's often necessary to make mistakes in order to evolve.

However, needing money to feed his family, Lynch landed a job with printer Rodger LaPele, who allowed him to paint at weekends. His film-making hopes took a knock, however, when he thought he had failed to secure an American Film Institute grant. But secured the funding to make The Grandmother (1970) and Tony Vellani invited him to study at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles. Looking back, Lynch insists he was happy enough with the way things had been going, but he knew this was a life-changing moment and he has never looked back.

Moving into the stables at the mansion in Beverly Hills, Lynch felt energised by the California sunshine. Divorced from Peggy, he endured a lecture from his father and brother to quit mucking around and get a proper job and started work on Eraserhead (1977). He still considers this his most satisfying cinematic experience, as he was able to create his own world on a modest budget and retain complete control over every aspect of the picture. As the film ends, Lynch sits behind a microphone and takes a deep draw on his cigarette, as he thinks back on that crossroads moment with quiet satisfaction.

In keeping with so many recent profiles of artists, photographers and war correspondents, the emphasis is firmly on self-eulogy. But, while Nguyen and collaborators Olivia Neergaard-Holm and Rick Barnes afford Lynch ample opportunity to wax lyrical on whatever topic comes to mind from his pre-features career, he proves too canny to give much away. Jason S keeps the camera fixed on Lynch's expressions of rapt concentration and on the rubber gloved-hands that tame a range of materials in order to produce his diverse and often oblique artworks. But fresh insights into his personality, philosophy or processes are few and far between. Thus, while it has been boldly edited by Neergaard-Holm to a twangy Badalamenti-esque score by Jonatan Bengta, this is essentially a flattery project that is only likely to appeal to those already firmly under Lynch's darkly mischievous spell.