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MovieMail's Review
A simultaneous celebration of the potential of digital film-making and Laura Dern’s face, Inland Empire is a culmination of the themes Director David Lynch first explored in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
Niki Grace, a Hollywood star, is offered what she hopes will be her comeback role, as the lead in On High in Blue Tomorrows, opposite womanising co-star, Devon. The night before she is offered the role, Niki is visited in her Hollywood mansion by a mysterious old woman who warns that her new film contains a brutal murder. As Niki soon learns, this killing could well be of the unscripted variety – Blue Tomorrows is a remake of a cursed Polish production that was abandoned with the violent death of its lead actors.
Soon, Niki and Devon’s on-screen romance spills uncontrollably into the real world, arousing the jealousy of Niki’s husband, Piotrek, who has links with the trafficking of Eastern European prostitutes. From there on in, the storytelling becomes increasingly fragmentary, and past and present, life and death, fantasy and reality, and (Lynch being Lynch) blondes and brunettes, swap places interchangeably.
Shot over two and a half years in Los Angeles and Poland, Inland Empire features a roster of suitably Lynchian cameos, including Harry Dean Stanton and Jeremy Irons. Laura Dern remains Inland Empire’s one constant, and her performance anchors the frequently hallucinogenic proceedings over the film’s 3 hour running time; she certainly deserved an Oscar-nomination (if not a medal).
Lynch’s films usually look like paintings. Inland Empire, by contrast, looks like a Polaroid, but Lynch harnesses the versatility of digital film-making using extreme close ups, natural lighting, and a creative process that allowed him to script and shoot on the fly. It’s a bold departure, but Lynch never loses his ability to terrify, transfix and unnerve with the slightest camera movement, and his sound design remains the hypnotic stuff of nightmares.
Like a deep dream, Inland Empire cannot be understood literally; its ‘real’ meaning may not, in fact, exist. Nonetheless, its themes and imagery are potent and instinctive, and never fail to grip even across its running time.
2 discs. Guardian interview with David Lynch at the NFT
David Lynch interview
Montage featurette including: The masterclass David Lynch made at the FNAC, an exhibition at the Agnes B Foundation, interview with Lynch by Michel Chion at the Cartier foundation.
Film Description
A potent, surrealist epic, Inland Empire never fails to terrify, transfix and unnerve across its 3-hour running time.
Laura Dern plays a Hollywood actress making her big comeback in a cursed production. When her on-screen romance with her rakish co-star Justin Theroux spills out into the real world, fantasy and reality collide into a grainy dreamscape of night and nightmare stretching from small-town Poland to the boulevards of Hollywood.
An audacious culmination of the themes first explored in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire is a must for all Lynch aficionados; it’s his most provocative film to date.
