Review: INLAND EMPIRE

Review: INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, 2006, USA).

Here are my notes written during my viewing...

1st 10 minutes - bewildering, a woman crying, 2 blurred figures. 1 takes her clothes off for some mysterious reason. Rabbits, a laugh track and a man wanting something. Sketchy conversation with neigbour seems normal in comparison.

The look is sometimes ghastly, mainly in scenes with high levels of contrast and in close-ups. Adds to otherworldness.

Neighbour. Fucking terrifying - wild eyes.

Goes on relatively coherently until the screwdriver scene.

There are consequences to one's actions, repeated.

Like somebody else's nightmare. A needle plays on a record player and a woman crying repeats.

The locomotion - Never could it be as unsettling as this, you would think.


That's as far as I got. I gave in and got sucked in by this world. And that's only about a third of the film.

Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) is an ageing actress living in Hollywood. One day she is visited by a "new neighbour" (Grace Zabreskie), who tells her that the part she will be getting (but has not got yet) is for a film not about lovers, but a "brutal fucking murder". Upon starting the film, she and co-star Devon (Justin Theroux) are informed by the director (Jeremy Irons) that the film "On High In Blue Tomorrows" is a remake of an unfinished Polish film which was stopped because everyone involved in it came to a sticky end. As well as this, Devon is warned off of persuing Nikki first by his entourage and then by her husband (Peter J. Lucas) who warns him that things will be done to ensure that the bonds of marriage remain. They end up sleeping together at which time Nikki says that she feels like she has been through it before but it was tomorrow. The next day, she is intrigued by a darkness towards the back of the film's set. Upon entering it, her personality fragments, she travels into different worlds, maybe the original Polish film, maybe of the people in the Polish film, may be the world of a curb crawler, maybe the life of a woman living with a Polish emigree who may kill her husband.
INLAND EMPIRE as Lynch would have us type it, seems to me like the great man's career has come full-circle and yet progressed further, like a spiral if you will, in that it feels like both a natural progression in his career, in terms of his use of narrative and subject matter and a spiritual return to the rawness of Eraserhead, his first feature. To write a review of it, almost seems like an insult to what Lynch has created with a cheap DV camera and no studio backing. This film will drive many crazy, the truest example of love it/hate it I think we have ever seen and to many my review will seem like prentious twaddle. I simply don't care. The images in this film are often truly mind-blowing. Lynch has always been known as a man who can create an atmosphere like no other but here, it feels like this is one area of his craft which he will never better. The film oozes menace, right from its first frame. The images are burnt into your head and really do stay with you. The sense of fractured time and world is represented so well that at one point I looked at my phone expecting 20 minutes to have passed, but 2 had! That's no lie either. Vagueness in this review is meant, to ruin any of the suprises which come from this film feels like a real shame. The lack of any cohesive narrative after that which I have told you, will be a problem for many and rightly so. Lynch has always been an aquired taste and I would not be suprised if he loses fans from this one, he surely won't be gaining any new ones either. This is a film preaching to the converted. And while it feels like a shame that he is not going to get the credit he desrves from more mainstream sources, I feel it would be right to say that Lynch wouldn't have it any other way. In fairness, much credit must be given to StudioCanal and Optimum Releasing for allowing this film to be shown as widely as it has been and it is reassuring that with a studio such as Optimum distributing this, it will certainly get a chance to shine on video.
Speaking of video... The look of the film. Lynch famously shot this on a Sony PD150 a pretty much consumer grade DV camera which used for its flexibility which in turn enabled Lynch to have more freedom with what he shot. The downside to this is that this film occasionally looks terrible. Even in what i am pretty sure was a digital presentation at the Watershed in Bristol (Feel free to correct me, I would be interested), the film does look amatuerish in parts, specifically, outdoors scenes. And yet, it adds to the mystery of the film. The actual camera itself feels like it is in on the gag, that it and Lynch are working together to create something which will eat away at you, in the INLAND EMPIRE of your imagination.
Laura Dern gives a bravura perfomance and holds the film up in her multiple roles, all with wildly different personalities and without an actress if her strength or even her particular look, the film does not feel like it would grab you as mich as it does. Supporting characters all do well in their own parts but do feel like objects in the background when compared to Dern and the images Lynch has created (Look out for the superimposition towards the end, truly haunting).
Bloody masterpiece.