Hard to know where to start with Olga Neuwirth’s operatic adaptation of David Lynch’s 1997 cult film, Lost Highway. With the gratuitous bonking relentlessly depicted on four large screens, magnifying the already explicit rumpy-pumpy on stage? With the bone-shuddering music that wrenches us from electronic blitzes and manic instrumental refrains to wry quotations of 17th century madrigals, via allusions to Kurt Weill and Lou Reed?

With the singers, who almost never sing? With the story, which warps time and perception, and morphs one character into another, so that narrative logic is scrambled into a hallucinogenic nightmare? Or with the high-tech, video-saturated production, stunningly designed by Philip Bussmann? That places most of the action, including a couple of blood-splattered murders, in a transparent cabinet above the stage (don’t go if you have a stiff neck)?

If all this suggests that Lost Highway isn’t your average night at the opera, and that you’d be wise to leave Auntie Ethel at home, then that’s spot on. The first fruit of a new collaboration between English National Opera and the Young Vic, it flips an irreverent, 90-minute V-sign at operatic expectations. And it is staged with eye-popping audacity and cinematic slickness by Diane Paulus. You won’t be bored, though you may come away wondering what it’s all about.

More worryingly, I came away wondering whether Neuwirth – a 39-year-old Austrian who has shot to avant-garde fame since writing this piece five years ago – has added anything meaningful to Lynch’s creepy, kinky film. Certainly not lyricism. Elfriede Jelinek’s libretto is either rapped or moaned when it isn’t spoken straight. And although Neuwirth uses a volatile mix of 20-piece live band (efficiently conducted by Baldur Bronnimann) and 360-degree electronics, much of the score seems like a film soundtrack – supporting the action rather than driving it.

Still, there are memorable performances. Valérie MacCarthy gamely slithers out of several skimpy frocks as both the femme fatale and her alter ego. David Moss makes a grotesque, psychotically gibbering mobster. Christopher Robson is a suitably pervy Peeping Tom, voyeuristically filming all the bonking with his camcorder.

And there is Lynch’s dislocating plot which will bewitch, bother or bewilder, depending on your penchant for riddles and red herrings. Does the jazz trumpeter banged up on death row for murdering his wife (or did he?), really transmogrify into someone different (or is it?), and proceed to seduce the same woman (or is she?) again? Is this a piece about parallel realities, or the inner demons that drive us mad? Plenty to ponder on your own lost highway home.

Box office: 020-7922 2922, to April 11

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