The reviews are divided on Wild at Heart, with praise clustering around Lynch’s disturbing atmosphere, unruly humour and the performances of Cage and Dern. Its admirers find the mixture of romance, violence and genre parody funny and unsettling, with colour, framing and camerawork giving the strangeness force. Even among the favourable notices, though, enthusiasm for individual scenes does not always extend to the film as a whole.
The divide concerns whether the excess has enough purpose or feeling behind it. The Guardian finds the later black humour weaker than the opening stretch and misses an emotional centre. RogerEbert.com regards the film as manipulative and unengaging, while The New Yorker sees restless images with little meaning. The spread is wide: what supporters value as audacity, detractors regard as poor judgement, and some sympathetic reviews still find the surrealism forced or overfamiliar.