At the end of the film, after Laura is killed, she is indeed welcomed by an angel. This ending resembles that of The Elephant Man, where Merrick's mother appears as an angel to welcome her son. More broadly, the guardian angel and similar entities are a semi-frequent motif in Lynch films, such as Eraserhead and Wild at Heart. However, this motif is more complicated than it first appears. Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith argue that the film repeatedly emphasizes that angels "did nothing to protect Laura" during her life, Chris Hughes writes that the film's more surrealist sequences were influenced by Jean Cocteau's film The Blood of a Poet (1932).

Mary Sweeney, the film's editor, said that fans "so badly wanted it to be like the TV show, and it wasn't. It was a David Lynch feature. And people were very angry about it. They felt betrayed." Looking back in 2017, Matthew Jackson (Syfy) said that the film had "all of the darkness of Twin Peaks with almost none of the soap opera irony, quirky humor or disorienting charm."

Reception

Box office

In a reversal of the usual practice, the film was first released in Japan on May 16, 1992 to capitalize on the show's devoted Japanese fanbase, under the title Twin Peaks: The Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer. Although Japanese reviews were mixed, the film was greeted with long lines of moviegoers at theaters.

After an early premiere at the Snoqualmie Twin Peaks Festival on August 14–16, 1992, well below its estimated $15 million break-even point. (New Line had paid $6 million for the North American distribution rights. Sciamma agreed that while she felt "totally lost" at times, the film "changed the way that I look at cinema" and after leaving the theater, "the whole world felt different".

Rationale for box office performance

The film's poor box office returns in North America have been attributed to various causes. Steve O'Brien (Yahoo Movies) pointed out that the series had already been cancelled due to low ratings, meaning that "it's not as if there was a public thirst for more Twin Peaks." even though the series left "numerous cliffhangers." At the same time, the film assumes a working understanding of the TV series. For example, the first act of the film focuses on the town of Deer Meadow, whose effect on the audience comes from being "a parallel-universe version" of the town of Twin Peaks, but "dumber, meaner, [and] uglier." where it was met with a polarized response. According to Lynch, CIBY's Francis Bouygues was not well-liked in France, which complicated the reception. Lynch said that when he arrived at Cannes, he felt a hostile environment and could feel that "people [were] very angry and upset." He added that the Cannes audience booed the film, describing the experience as "horrible", Contemporary news reports mention a mixture of "booing and applause" and some "hoots and whistles."

Critics at Cannes were generally unimpressed by the film. Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), who deemed the film "shockingly bad," reported that he spoke with over a dozen U.S. and Canadian critics at Cannes and only one liked the film. Janet Maslin (The New York Times) dismissed the film as "disastrous", "pathologically unpleasant", and "brain-dead grotesque". Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino said that while he had enjoyed Lynch's earlier movies, Fire Walk with Me made him think "David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different."

Despite its mixed critical and poor commercial response, Fire Walk with Me received consideration for several awards, particularly for Angelo Badalamenti's musical score. At the 19th Saturn Awards, the film won the award for Best Music and was also nominated for Best Horror Film, Best Actress (Sheryl Lee), Best Supporting Actor (Ray Wise), and Best Writing. At the 8th Independent Spirit Awards, the film won the award for Best Original Score and was also nominated for Best Female Lead (Lee).

Contemporary critical response

Although Lynch expected the film to be polarizing and said it would be impossible to make a movie that appealed to everyone, reviews from American critics were generally negative. New Line Cinema declined to pre-screen the film for critics, which the Los Angeles Times called "at the very least, unusual." The Times surmised that New Line withheld the film because industry insiders considered it "an unqualified disaster" and "expected bad reviews."