Reception
Upon Eraserhead's release, Variety offered a negative review, calling it "a sickening bad-taste exercise". The review expressed incredulity over the film's long gestation and described its finale as unwatchable. Comparing Eraserhead to Lynch's next film The Elephant Man, Tom Buckley of The New York Times felt that while the latter was a well-made film with an accomplished cast, the former was not. Buckley called Eraserhead "murkily pretentious", and felt that the film's horror aspects stemmed solely from the appearance of the deformed child rather than from its script or performances. Writing in 1984, Lloyd Rose of The Atlantic felt that Eraserhead demonstrated that Lynch was "one of the most unalloyed surrealists ever to work in the movies". Rose described the film as being intensely personal, finding that unlike previous surrealist films, such as Luis Buñuel's 1929 work Un Chien Andalou or 1930's L'Age d'Or, Lynch's imagery "isn't reaching out to us from his films; we're sinking into them". In a 1993 review for the Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington described Eraserhead as unique, feeling that the film's "intensity" and "nightmare clarity" were a result of Lynch's attention to detail in its creation due to his involvement in so many roles during its production. In the 1995 essay Bad Ideas: The Art and Politics of Twin Peaks, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum felt that Eraserhead represented Lynch's best work. Rosenbaum felt that the director's artistic talent declined as his popularity grew, and compared the film to Wild at Heart—Lynch's most recent feature film at that time—saying "even the most cursory comparison of Eraserhead with Wild at Heart reveals an artistic decline so precipitous that it is hard to imagine the same person making both films".
Twenty-first century critical opinion of the film is widely positive. Eraserhead holds an average rating of 90% on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, representing the distillation of forty-two reviews. Writing for Empire magazine, Steve Beard rated the film five stars out of five. He felt that it was "a lot more radical and enjoyable than later Hollywood efforts" and highlighted its mix of surrealist body horror and black comedy. The BBC's Almar Haflidason awarded Eraserhead three stars out of five, describing it as "an unremarkable feat by later standards". Haflidason felt that the film was a gathering of loosely-related ideas, adding that it is "so consumed with surreal imagery that there are almost limitless possibilities to read personal theories into it"; the reviewer's own take on these themes were that they represented a fear of personal commitment and featured "a strong sexual undercurrent". A reviewer writing for Film4 rated Eraserhead five stars out of five, describing it as "by turns beautiful, annoying, funny, exasperating and repellent, but always bristling with a nervous energy". The Film4 reviewer felt that Eraserhead was unlike most films released to that point, save for the collaborations between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí; however, Lynch denies having seen any of these before Eraserhead. Writing for The Village Voice, Nathan Lee praised the film's use of sound, writing "to see the film means nothing—one must also hear it". He described the film's sound design as "an intergalactic seashell cocked to the ears of an acid-tripping gargantua".
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw similarly lauded the film, also awarding it five stars out of five. Bradshaw considered it to be a beautiful film, describing its sound design as "industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism". He highlighted the film's body horror elements, comparing it to Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. Keith Phipps, writing for AllRovi, also gave the film a rating of five stars out of five; he highlighted the disturbing sound design of the film and described it as "an open metaphor". He felt that Eraserhead "sets up the obsessions that would follow through his career", adding his belief that the film's surrealism enhanced the understanding of the director's later films. In an article for The Daily Telegraph, film-maker Marc Evans praised both the sound design and Lynch's ability "to make the ordinary seem so odd", considering the film an inspiration on his own work. A review of the film in the same newspaper compared Eraserhead to the works of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, describing it as a chaotic parody of family life. Manohla Dargis, writing for The New York Times, called the film "less a straight story than a surrealistic assemblage". Dargis felt that the film's imagery evoked the paintings of Francis Bacon and the Georges Franju 1949 documentary Blood of the Beasts. Film Threat's Phil Hall called Eraserhead Lynch's best film, believing that the director's subsequent output failed to live up to it. Hall highlighted the film's soundtrack and Nance's "Chaplinesque" physical comedy as the film's stand-out elements.
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