John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance is preoccupied with being lost. Before he and his three companions embark on their fateful trip down the Cahulawassee River, Lewis (Burt Reynolds) announces with bravado, ‘I never been lost in my life’. When he eventually manages to find said river, however, Lewis gives the lie to his earlier comment by admitting that ‘sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything’. Between these two remarks Drew (Ronny Cox) bows out of a guitar and banjo duel with a local youth, happily declaring ‘I’m lost!’ He has lost his place in the music, which is a spatial metaphor for a non-spatial phenomenon. The boy has shown greater mastery than Drew, who is forced to admit to having become disorientated, but entering this state proves to be a joyful and exuberant experience, one that, as David Lynch says, can even be beautiful. Not that this is always the case; as the film continues, being lost comes to take on increasingly nightmarish dimensions. In fact, although we certainly could say that Deliverance is about four men getting lost on a river, it might be more accurately described as being about disorientation and confusion. Ami Harbin has suggested that ‘[t]o become disoriented is, roughly, to lose one's bearings in relation to others, environments, and life projects’ (Harbin 2016: xi). All three of these features can be seen in Boorman's film. Its final section, for example, follows its protagonists as they lose their bearings in relation to their ‘life projects’ in attempting to cover up what happened on the river. Their relation to others becomes, at times, fatally confused: Ed (Jon Voigt) kills a man because he mistakes him for somebody else. And the film ironically explores the relationship between environment and disorientation by indicating a way in which the men could be said not to get lost. Their confidence in their spatial location is undermined by two local mountain men who tell them, before brutally assaulting them, that ‘this river don't go to Aintry’. In fact, as it turns out, it does. The protagonists, in a sense, knew where they were the whole time, but this realisation only goes to show quite how profoundly disorientated they have become.