Which Movie Is About Watching the Wrong Person
Imagine getting mysterious videos delivered to your door, showing someone filming your house from the inside. That is the creepy setup in the 1997 movie Lost Highway, directed by David Lynch. The main character, Fred Madison, a jazz saxophonist played by Bill Pullman, starts receiving unmarked VHS tapeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Highway_(film). The first tape captures footage of his home. The next one goes further, filming him and his wife Renee asleep in their bed. It feels like a total invasion, as if the wrong person has eyes on his life, watching every move without permission.
Fred’s world unravels fast. He hears a strange message on his intercom: “Dick Laurent is dead.” Then the tapes keep coming, pulling him into paranoia. At a party, he meets a pale-faced man who claims to be at Fred’s house right then, proving it by picking up a phone call Fred makes home. This mystery watcher haunts Fred, blending fear with confusion. Soon, Fred gets arrested for Renee’s murder, even though things do not add up. In prison, something wild happens: he wakes up as a different man named Pete Dayton, a young mechanic played by Balthazar Getty.
The story shifts when Pete gets tangled with Alice, a seductive woman linked to a gangster called Mr. Eddy. They plan a robbery, but secrets from photos and nosebleeds hint at deeper connections. Pete ends up back in a desert cabin, transforming again in a flash of light. The film plays with identity, looping back to Fred, making you question who is really being watched and why. It mixes noir style with horror, called a “21st-Century Noir Horror” in its screenplayhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Highway_(film).
Lost Highway stands out for this theme of watching the wrong person because the tapes invade Fred’s private world by mistake or design, leading to his downfall. It echoes older films with mix-ups, like Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest from 1959. There, ad man Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, gets mistaken for a spy named George Kaplan who does not even exist. Bad guys kidnap him, thinking he is the target, and chase him across the countryhttps://www.britannica.com/topic/North-by-Northwest. Thornhill dodges crop duster planes and Mount Rushmore climbers, all because someone picked the wrong guy to follow and attack.
Hitchcock loved these “wrong man” plots. His earlier film The 39 Steps has Richard Hannay fleeing after a murder he did not commit, with police and spies on his trail for the wrong reasonshttps://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/alfred-hitchcock/the-39-steps-alfred-hitchcock-north-by-northwest. Comedies twist it too, like Lover Come Back, where ad rivals Jerry and Carol mix up identities over a fake product, leading to romance amid the blundershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lover_Come_Back_(1961_film).
But Lost Highway takes watching the wrong person to a dark, surreal level. The VHS tapes make it personal and terrifying, as if your own life is being spied on by a stranger who got the address wrong. It leaves viewers piecing together the puzzle long after the credits.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Highway_(film)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/North-by-Northwest
https://www.oreateai.com/blog/best-comedy-of-errors-movies/dbe5a0689e888f0873fe1c18b9ec5f93
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lover_Come_Back_(1961_film)
https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/alfred-hitchcock/the-39-steps-alfred-hitchcock-north-by-northwest
https://letterboxd.com/film/neptunes-daughter/reviews/
