It revolves around the investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) and the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), a popular high school student in the fictional Washington town of Twin Peaks.

A few notable cast members, including Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Richard Beymer, did not reappear for various reasons.

Kyle MacLachlan, who starred as Special Agent Dale Cooper in the series, was reluctant to return out of fear of being typecast, which resulted in a smaller presence in the film than originally planned.

[6] Upon release, the film received polarized reviews from critics in the United States and was a box office failure domestically, although it fared much better in Japan.

[10][11] In 1988, in the small town of Deer Meadow, Washington, teenage drifter Teresa Banks' body floats down a river, wrapped in plastic.

FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole sends agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley to investigate.

While examining Teresa's body, the agents notice that a ring is missing from her finger, and find a small piece of paper with the letter "T" inserted under the fingernail.

Their long-lost colleague, Agent Phillip Jeffries, materializes in the building and walks into Cole's office, where he rants about a meeting he witnessed involving mysterious spirits.

One year later in Twin Peaks, high school homecoming queen Laura Palmer uses cocaine and cheats on her boyfriend Bobby Briggs with biker James Hurley.

There, she sees a trapped Cooper enter a room and encounter the Man from Another Place, the latter of whom identifies himself as the arm and offers Teresa's ring to Laura.

At night, she ends her relationship with James, jumps off his motorcycle and escapes to a cabin in the woods, where Jacques, Leo Johnson, and underage prostitute Ronette Pulaski are waiting.

[15][16] Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, whose relationship soured during the second season, disagreed on whether to make the project a conventional sequel or a non-linear prequel.

[14] But on July 11, 1991, Ken Scherer, CEO of Lynch/Frost productions, announced that the film was not going to be made because series star Kyle MacLachlan did not want to reprise his role of Special Agent Dale Cooper to avoid typecasting.

Lynch and co-writer Robert Engels rewrote the screenplay so that Teresa Banks's murder was investigated by Agent Chester Desmond and not by Cooper as originally planned.

These actors included Michael Ontkean (Harry S. Truman), Warren Frost (Will Hayward), Mary Jo Deschanel (Eileen Hayward), Everett McGill (Ed Hurley), Wendy Robie (Nadine Hurley), Jack Nance (Pete Martell), Joan Chen (Jocelyn Packard), Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran), Harry Goaz (Andy Brennan), Michael Horse (Tommy "Hawk" Hill), Russ Tamblyn (Dr. Jacoby), Don S. Davis (Garland Briggs), and Charlotte Stewart (Betty Briggs).

[13] Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me was entered into the 1992 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the Palme d'Or,[25] where it was met with a polarized response.

[26] There is a persistent story that the film was met with boos and hisses from the Cannes audience,[10][27] though co-writer Robert Engels denies that this event ever happened[6] and a contemporary news report only says there were some "hoots and whistles" during a screening for critics and journalists.

[32] In his review for Variety magazine, Todd McCarthy said, "Laura Palmer, after all the talk, is not a very interesting or compelling character and long before the climax has become a tiresome teenager".

[34] Rolling Stone magazine's Peter Travers wrote, "though the movie ups the TV ante on nudity, language and violence, Lynch's control falters.

"[40] On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 65% approval rating based on 82 reviews, with an average score of 6.8/10 and a consensus: "For better or worse, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is every bit as strange and twisted as you'd expect from David Lynch.

[46] In 2013, The Village Voice wrote of the film, “In its own singular way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece,” while further stating, “Blue Velvet, devised as a kind of distorted TV soap, dug up a small town’s sordid secrets, suggesting that all seemingly good things have a dark side.

But Fire Walk With Me taps into something considerably more terrifying: not only the evil buried somewhere in the quintessential middle-class family, but the evil buried somewhere in all of us, and our capacity for it.”[47] In his review for Time Out, Tom Huddleston gave the film five stars out of five and writes, “There's nothing so dark and demented as Fire Walk With Me, the simplest, strangest, saddest and arguably greatest of all his (Lynch’s) films.

Further speaking of the film, he said, "I've never seen a movie that's been made in the last thirty years [...] in America which so asks us to understand and be in the shoes of a person suffering so profoundly.

"[54] Lindsay Hallam, the author of a book about the film, attributes the initial negative reaction as being due to the following: "Lynch does not let [the audience] off the hook – we are taken so far into Laura's experience, without any respite and with none of the humour associated with the series".

[55] In an article for The Guardian published in 2017, critic Martyn Conterio wrote of the film's reappraisal: “Fire Walk With Me is not just an artistic triumph in its own right, it’s the key to the entire Twin Peaks universe.

Write it in your diary.” This was originally intended to set up two more films in which Laura's diary entry was discovered, continuing and then concluding the series' narrative in a non-linear style going across time.

It had been tentatively scheduled for release on October 17, 2007, but MK2 subsequently opted instead to re-release a bare-bones edition of Fire Walk with Me, citing a new version including the deleted scenes has been put on hold indefinitely.

In November 2008, Lynch said the following regarding the deleted scenes: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is owned by a company called MK2 in France.

[72] The Criterion version of the film was re-released as part of Twin Peaks: From Z to A, a 21-disc limited edition Blu-ray box set, which aside from the film also includes all three television seasons in their entirety, The Missing Pieces, previously released special features, six hours of new behind-the-scenes content, and 4K versions of the original pilot and episode 8 from The Return, released on December 10, 2019.

[76] In addition to his instrumental compositions, Fire Walk with Me's soundtrack features vocal accompaniment to Badalamenti's songs by Jimmy Scott and Julee Cruise.