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Mulholland Drive (Mulholland Dr.)

The film opens with brightly lit images of couples dancing the jitterbug, over which a young blonde woman appears smiling and being applauded, followed by a point-of-view shot descending toward a pillow as someone lies down.

At night on Mulholland Drive, a brunette woman in an elegant evening dress narrowly escapes being shot by her chauffeur when another car crashes into them. Left with amnesia, she wanders into Los Angeles and hides in a vacant apartment. The next morning, she is discovered by Betty Elms, an aspiring actress newly arrived from Deep River, Ontario, who is staying at her aunt's place. The brunette adopts the name "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth and recalls only that she is in danger. The two become friends and discover a blue key and a large sum of cash in Rita's purse.

A man eating at a diner recounts a nightmare to his friend in which he encounters a monstrous figure in the alley behind the diner. When they go outside to investigate, a filthy homeless person appears from around a corner exactly as predicted, and the man collapses in shock.

Film director Adam Kesher is pressured by mob -connected businessmen to cast an unknown blonde, Camilla Rhodes, in his new film The Sylvia North Story. When he refuses, the mob shuts down production and freezes his accounts. He returns home to find his wife cheating on him, is beaten and thrown out, and finds out his bank account has been frozen. A mysterious cowboy warns him to cast Camilla. Meanwhile, incompetent hitman Joe Messing botches a job, killing bystanders.

Rita remembers the name "Diane Selwyn," and Betty locates her address in a phone book. A seemingly psychic neighbor warns that "someone is in trouble," and building manager Coco cautions Betty about letting Rita stay. Betty leaves for an audition, where she performs brilliantly; a casting agent brings her to Adam's audition for The Sylvia North Story. While Camilla auditions with a performance of " I've Told Ev'ry Little Star," Betty and Adam share a brief but intense glance before she slips away to meet Rita. Adam agrees to cast Camilla to appease the mob.

Betty and Rita visit Diane's apartment complex, where a neighbor who recently exchanged units with Diane says she has not been seen in some time and directs them to her apartment. Inside, they discover a woman's decomposing corpse on the bed. Rita panics and tries to cut her own hair, but Betty instead disguises her with a blonde wig. That night, they have sex and Betty twice confesses she is in love. Rita later wakes them both by chanting silencio, no hay banda ('silence, there is no band') in her sleep, and insists on visiting Club Silencio, where the host explains all performances are pre-recorded. Betty and Rita weep as Rebekah Del Rio performs a Spanish rendition of " Crying," and Betty discovers a blue box in her purse that matches Rita's key. Back at the apartment, Rita unlocks the box and realizes Betty has vanished, then disappears herself.

The narrative shifts to Diane, a depressed and struggling actress who looks exactly like Betty. She awakens in the bedroom where the corpse was found. Moving through her morning in a daze, she recalls memories of her former lover Camilla, a femme fatale actress who resembles Rita: a volatile sexual encounter and breakup; being forced to watch Adam and Camilla kiss during a film rehearsal; and a dinner party at Adam's house, where Diane learns she lost the lead in The Sylvia North Story to Camilla, to whom Adam announces his engagement. The memories culminate in Diane hiring Joe at the diner to kill Camilla, with a blue key promised as confirmation.

The homeless person behind the diner opens the blue box, releasing a tiny elderly couple – the same pair who accompanied Betty upon her arrival in Los Angeles. Back in the present, a traumatized Diane stares at the blue key on her coffee table. Terrorized by hallucinations of the elderly couple, she flees to her bedroom and shoots herself, dying in the same position as the earlier corpse. As the room fills with gunsmoke, Betty and Rita are shown smiling at each other. At Club Silencio, a blue-haired woman whispers "silencio".