"Though I had seen Eraserhead...and had thought (Lynch) a true original, I wasn't prepared for the strength he would bring out of understatement (in telling of) the life of John Merrick, the grievously eminent Victorian who is sometimes said to have been the ugliest man who ever lived.... (This) young director...has extraordinary taste; it's not the kind of taste that enervates artists--it's closer to grace. The movie shows us what the monster feels about himself and what his view of the world is and what he sees when he looks out of the single rectangular slit in his hood (which suggests an elephant's eye). He must see everything framed, as on a screen.... You may find yourself so absorbed that your time sense changes and you begin to examine the images with something of the same wonder that John Merrick (John Hurt) shows.... The Elephant Man has the power and some of the dream logic of a silent film, yet there are also wrenching, pulsating sounds--the hissing steam and the pounding of the start of the industrial age. It's Dickensian London, with perhaps a glimpse of the process that gave rise to Cubism." Pauline Kael