Premonition Following an Evil Deed (1995) User Reviews (6)

A rock solid David Lynch film for David Lynch fans...

[24Brix · 8/10 · 31 August 2022]

You're given 55 seconds and three takes to create a film using a vintage Lumière camera, no artificial light, and no sync'ed sound. What do you do with an opportunity like that? If you're David Lynch you do the following:

"In 1995 Lumière and Company called and said that forty directors from all over the world were being asked to make short films using the original Lumière Brothers camera made out of wood, glass, and brass. It's a hand-cranked camera with a little wooden magazine that holds fifty-five seconds of film, and I thought it sounded cool, but I had no ideas. Then I was in the woodshop and I got this idea of a person who's been killed - I still have the original drawing I made when I got the idea-and we got working on it pretty fast. We built a hundred-foot dolly track in Gary D'Amico's yard and special effects engineer Big Phil Sloan was running it, and another Phil who worked with Gary made this big box that went over the camera, and when you pulled this wire these doors in the box would fly open and you could shoot. Then you'd pull it again and the doors would bang shut for a tiny instant while the camera moved on the dolly from one set to the next. There was a shot of a body in a field, a woman on a couch, two women dressed in white with a deer, a huge tank Gary built with a nude woman in it, and some men walking around carrying these stick-like things. Then you move through smoke to a sheet of paper that explodes into fire and reveals the final set. You couldn't miss a single mark, and you only had fifty-five seconds to make all these changes, and it was thrilling. They had a Frenchman cranking the camera - he went everywhere with it - and we had six or seven people on the dolly, and there were like a hundred people there and everybody had a thing to do. The woman in the tank was named Dawn Salcedo, and she did a great job. She could only hold her breath for so long, but everything had to happen at a precise time and she had to be in the tank holding her breath when we arrived at the tank. At the beginning of the film there's a woman sitting on a couch who's having a premonition, and as soon as we got that shot, these guys had to get in there and move the couch to the last set. It was so much fun." - Copyright 2018 by David Lynch, "Room to Dream", pp. 349-350, Random House.

I thoroughly enjoyed this short which I only learned about while reading "Room to Dream". Now I want all the other chapters in the story. You'll find many nods to his other work that came before and after the making of this short piece. It's worth multiple watches, especially if you're a fan of what came before and after. The 1-minute video is readily available if you search for it.

What was the point of the naked lady?

[Groverdox · 6/10 · 21 September 2023]

"Premonitions Following An Evil Deed" is a fifty-five second long film produced by David Lynch as part of a collection that celebrated the Lumiere brothers invention of the first motion picture camera.

Lynch and his thirty-nine colleagues were commissioned to use the original wooden camera and make a movie akin to the kind the Lumiere brothers made. The filmmakers weren't allowed to use sound, and the films they produced had to use a continuous shot captured in no more than three attempts.

I've watched the movie a few times now and I can't really say what it's about. We see three policemen coming to the body of a man lying on the ground. A woman - perhaps the man's widow - is shown at home, turning her head perhaps in response to a phone call or house call of the police telling her what has happened. Then we cut to some kind of underground laboratory where we see a nude woman in a glass tube while scientists work around her. Then we go back to the woman's house, where she receives the cops we saw at the beginning, and then it's over.

What was the deal with the nude woman in the lab? I didn't understand that part.

I don't know what to say about this one. I guess it succeeds at what it was supposed to do. It's only really of interest to diehard Lynch fans, though, like the previous short of his I saw, "The Cowboy and the Frenchman", which was also made on commission.

Since Lynch made this on commission for other people's projects, you can't critique them too harshly. But nor can you really recommend them.

My favorite David Lynch short

[Rectangular_businessman · 8/10 · 27 June 2022]

Of all the shorts David Lynch have made, this is my favorite one, managing to encapsulate many key elements from his weird creative universe in merely one minute.

I kinda wish Lynch had made this a series, similar to Twin Peaks.

An essay maybe ?

[AvionPrince16 · 5/10 · 18 May 2022]

I dont know really what to think about these short . But for me its an exercise for David Lynch to try to tell abstract things by the images that s all.

Another Nightmare

[Hitchcoc · 5/10 · 30 April 2019]

I adore David Lynch. I have no idea why he did this film. Sometimes I think he is putting us on with these vignettes that the average person could say, "I bet I could do much better, given the opportunity." But we don't. This is one minute from the discovery of a murder victim to the telling of her family. OK. Now what?

Lynch's journey a century back

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 24 June 2017]

"Premonition Following an Evil Deed" is an American 1-minute short film from 1995, but if you take a look at it, then you can also make a statement for this being a movie from 1895 because it is in black-and-white and, despite it being an English-language film according to IMDb, there is no spoken or written language in here. It is probably director David Lynch's tribute to the very early days of filmmaking and as such it is a fairly dark movie in terms of the subject. Nothing uncommon for Lynch. But I also do believe that without his name attached to the project, this would be a relatively forgotten film now over 2 decades later. It is also one of Lynch's least known (short) filmmaking efforts. There is just nothing really memorable to it other than the imitation aspect of what Méliès and others did a century earlier. Not a failure I guess, but also not worth seeing for anybody other than Lynch completionists. I give it a thumbs-down.