I've had dreams like this. Everything's confused and mushed together, you find yourself trying to fix something using a method that will make no sense upon waking. Not a nightmare so much as an annoyance, an endless period of unpleasantness.That's the experience of Inland Empire.The first time I watched this movie I gave up about half an hour in. It wasn't just that it was random and incoherent, but also that it was painfully slow. Every scene dragged. Rehearsals for the movie Laura Dern was working on revealed a really boring movie, and we saw a lot of it.But a few months later, after watching Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: The Return, I thought maybe I should try again. Maybe, as with Mulholland, it will all click together.There is debate on whether one should even try to make sense of Inland Empire. Some argue you should just *experience* it. So the first thing to mention is I did not enjoy the experience. The movie is just so slow, with so little happening. There are good elements; Dern is excellent, especially when telling grim stories to an unnamed man, and there's an oppressive sense of dread that I like, but overall I was just bored. Mulholland Drive made sense to me by the end, but even if it hadn't, I could still say I enjoyed the experience of watching it. I can't say that of Inland Empire.After I watched the film I read some analysis. Some people began by saying, "this movie isn't that hard to understand once you get the key," but these people have radically different analyses. So no, this is not easy to understand, although there do seem to be some points of agreement. But I think the reality is, as one writer suggested, that Lynch was just messing around with his friends and his digital camera and at a certain point had so much material that he thought he might as well turn it into a movie. Lynch himself said he didn't know where the movie was going. So while yes, you can create a narrative out of it if you play with the chronology and the characters, it's probably nothing to do with Lynch.This is the Lynch of Eraserhead; the artsy guy who isn't afraid to bore or annoy his audience. Some people love that. Some people hate a movie that is comprehensible, wanting something loose that allows for interpretation. This movie is for those people. If you're not one of those people, I would suggest skipping this.And if you want to see a really great movie that blurs the line between movies and reality, seek out the anime Millennium Actress.

Maybe the cinema, in some sense, has not evolved since "Un chien andalou". It is probable that the experimentation in this art has not overcome Maya Deren or Alejandro Jodorowsky. Lynch's risky films confirms this suspicion but... Is everything allowed in this game? Even if it does not work? Inland Empire is a too pretentious, too rigid and poorly-explained thriller. Tedious, at last: Silences in the indecipherable dialogues fill the footage for 3 hours. The surreal imaginary is too static, the swinging between the different planes of the plot is too confusing and the climax is nonexistent. If David Lynch deserves your time you can try to value his attempts: the combination of nightmares and his own Symbology, the rabbits and the rest of the cast, and the disturbing atmospheres! Those attempts are not enough to overcome the void that exists in this film. An exercise in experimentation that is unsuccessful, too cryptic, failed and without guarantees that David Lynch's audience will like it.

This feels like the natural culmination point of Lynch's films. Mulholland Drive was a masterpiece, whereas this feels like the indulgence that the latter film afforded him. That's not meant derogatorily. Mulholland Drive was a perfect Lynch film, but Inland Empire felt like he'd finally got the green light to follow all of his artistic tendencies as far as he wanted (even jokingly acknowledged in the final scene). It's a descent into madness, and the rule book went out of the window. This has some of Lynch's most memorable scenes, but it also pushes the viewer's natural inclination to apply order beyond the limit.It's not free form stream of consciousness, but is right on the line. There are hints all over the place, but unlike Mulholland Drive there isn't a suggested interpretation that emerges. I have my own ideas about what this film is meant to be, but that's my personal reading. I believe that Lynch aimed to make a film that invited multiple interpretations, and which resisted definitive resolution. It's this open-ended approach that makes it such an enigmatic and imaginative film. It provokes your imagination.

Exhaustingly ambitious, mind-bending and deliberately ugly-looking 3-hour Hollywood satire/horror epic, shot on super cheap digital video by madman filmmaker David Lynch and starring Laura Dern in complex dual roles, is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime movie that seems to have been crafted in another dimension entirely, where traditional narrative rules don't apply and basic visual language has been vomited up into nerve-wracking anti-cinema. It is a truly maddening, singular experience, and one most audiences would never want to subject themselves to. But it is fascinating, filled with bizarre thrills and an incredible lead performance that somehow manages to anchor the entire film, even when it is impossible to logically comprehend.Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, an aging Hollywood actress with a sinister Polish husband who is cast in the lead role (alongside Justin Theroux) in a corny drama about adultery that is discovered to be a remake of a Polish film based on a cursed gypsy folktale that was never completed because the lead actors were mysteriously murdered. It's not too long before Nikki is confusing herself with her character Susan Blue and the film essentially free-falls into intense insanity for two straight hours. Nikki/Susan become trapped in some terrifying, unstable version of the film she's making, where time collapses in on itself and its story (which is never even made completely clear) winds and twists around itself endlessly, yet with new details and narrative strands constantly emerging, as if its own plot has become a cancer. Sometimes she can witness previous incarnations of the story set in Poland if she burns a cigarette hole through a piece of silk. Other times she sees or runs into other versions of herself. Her shady husband, who remains her spouse in the movie universe, seems to be up to no good, but is he actually helping in some way? She hangs out with a group of young prostitutes at her house, two of which act as guides through this terror. In an inter-cut future time line the film eventually catches up with, she sits in a dank interrogation room clutching a screwdriver, talking about her life and making even more of a narrative mess out of the head-spinning story in stunningly performed, foul-mouthed monologues that prove Laura Dern is an acting powerhouse. Also people keep getting murdered with screwdrivers. And there's a sitcom with people in rabbit costumes spouting non sequiturs (laugh track and all) relevant to what is going on only in the most abstract way. And there's a scary Polish man, The Phantom, or maybe his name is Crimp and he's Susan's neighbor, or maybe he's a man who once worked at the circus, who seems to be controlling all of this for nefarious and unexplained reasons. Oh and there's a crying woman trapped in a hotel room watching all of this on a TV.That's about as coherently as I can describe the plot, and that still doesn't touch on like half of the mammoth thing. It is dense and gnarled and unhinged in exhilarating ways that modern cinema rarely strives for. With crude tools, game actors and endless imagination, there's a freedom present that is refreshing, even when it's a debilitating experience. Lynch, continuing his fascination with unanswerable mysteries (see also Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr.) has crafted his purest expression of narrative implosion, in which the fearful and confused feeling of being lost in a terrible waking nightmare is more important than piecing together its myriad threads (which is frankly impossible). That being said, there is an easy tendency to throw ones hands up and declare the thing to be random nonsense, when it really isn't. It actually sticks rather close to itself and its premise all of the way through; this sense that it is nothing but random scenes and images ignores the connective tissue running between every sequence, even when it isn't progressing in order. And in a dazzling third act, after its chaotic ever-changing middle hour, the film adopts a sort of real time perspective that follows Susan/Nikki, almost like a video game, as she fulfills her requirements in her "role" and breaks the cursed story chain. It doesn't necessarily make "sense", but there's a progression here, a story that runs forward even as it's concurrently running in every other direction. It is an amazing cinematic feat, about the power of stories and the performances inside of them. It's often hideous digital video photography, at odds with all of Lynch's previous gorgeously shot films, works when you consider he is attempting to literally break free from cinematic constraints. To make a film about film and Hollywood storytelling shot in a deliberately un-cinematic style and breaking all storytelling rules creates something truly transgressive and unique. When it was released 9 years ago, it was criticized for its murky, often hideous photography, but it actually seems kind of ahead of the curve now, considering the prevalence of sloppy looking hand-held digital films now on the mainstream market. And even with such low resolution and clearly cheap production value, it can still sometimes look rather beautiful in a harsh, unpolished way. It's one of the most experimental and thought-provoking American films of the 2000's and worth watching from any serious cinephile or adventurous film-goer. Having seen Lynch's previous films certainly helps, otherwise you're really in for a shock.