Critic Reviews
87
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
positive
12(80%)
mixed
3(20%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 15 Critic Reviews
100
See Eraserhead once and it’ll lodge itself firmly in some dank recess of your brain and refuse to vacate.
100
Gothically shot in black and white and numerous shots that have influenced the next generation of directors, this is a classic, no matter how comfortable it is to watch.
100
Eraserhead is a singular work of the imagination, a harrowing, heartbreaking plunge into the darkest recesses of the soul.
100
What makes Eraserhead great-and still, perhaps the best of all Lynch's films? Intensity. Nightmare clarity. And perhaps also it's the single-mindedness of its vision; Lynch's complete control over this material, where, working on a shoestring, he served as director, producer, writer, editor and sound designer.
100
It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.
100
Here was a film that took elements that one might have encountered in other movies in the past—black humor, gore, surrealism, erotic imagery, gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and oddball performances—and presented them in such a unique and deeply personal manner that the end result was something that literally looked, sounded and felt like nothing that had ever come before it.
100
Eraserhead is an extraordinarily raw film that’s not so much an announcement of its filmmaker’s obsessions, but a complete, intimate, and heartbreaking fulfillment of them.
100
It's a creepily sensuous film that suggests that the dark and troubling things we like to repress inhabit dresser drawers, live behind the radiator or lie under the bed. They are part of the environment.
90
The slow, strange rhythm is very unsettling and takes some getting used to, but it's an altogether amazing, sunsuous film; it even has an element of science fiction and some creepy musical numbers, and the soundtrack is as original and peculiar as the imagery.
90
Lynch comes amazingly close to the logic of dreams and nightmares, in which successive layers of reality seem to dissolve, sucking you into a terrifying vortex. [11 Sep 1978, p.95]
