It is difficult to assess a film that is not merely incoherent, but willfully impenetrable—a film that goes beyond sampling art house surrealism and becomes a straight-up avant-garde affair, where narrative logic and causality are sacrificed in order to make seemingly random connections between characters, images and emotions. David Lynch's most recent film, ""Inland Empire,"" shot on a midrange digital video camera over the course of two-and-a-half years, is one of these films.
Unlike many of Lynch's previous efforts, which begin by following traditional narrative structures only to dissolve into surreal dream-logic, ""Inland Empire"" starts off with disconnected scenes of a woman crying while watching TV and three people (one of them Naomi Watts) in gigantic, hokey rabbit suits going about domestic tasks while laugh tracks are played over their oblique, confessional conversations.
This soon gives way to the film's only decipherable plot, which involves Laura Dern (in one of the most challenging and impressive performances ever put to film) and Justin Theroux as Nikki and Devon, movie stars remaking a film that was put into production years earlier until its two leads were murdered. Nikki and Devon play small-town Southerners committing adultery, and before long their real lives mimic the film, with the two becoming involved romantically, much to the concern of the director (Jeremy Irons), since Nikki's husband is a psychotic, controlling freak.
As those familiar with mind-fuck films might guess, these parallel plots converge, and soon enough Nikki—and the viewer—don't know whether the events before them are actually happening or merely occurring in Nikki's mind. But Lynch is hardly a typical director, and thankfully he isn't content to stick with the ""is it real or is it imagined?"" trick. The film soon devolves into a collection of repetitious images, monologues and exchanges. One moment Dern is Nikki the actor, then she is Nikki's onscreen character, then she's in the Polish folktale the script was based on and then she's seeing a shrink and telling him how her man tried to kill her with a crowbar, until she ""kicked him straight in the balls so hard they go crawling into his brain for refuge—he went down faster than a two-dollar whore.""
Then Dern, under various character pretenses, finds herself traveling back and forth in time, all the while enjoying the company of a cackling hoard of whorish party-girls/prostitutes, who alternately tease her and emotionally support her. They also perform a choreographed dance to Little Eva's ""The Loco-Motion.""
The people in rabbit suits soon jump back in, as do images of record needles, screwdrivers stabbing into stomachs and crying women. If you expect to watch these collections of images and vague storylines and take away clear messages of symbolic linking, you're in for a headache. But that's not to say the film is like a half-burned copy of the Voynich manuscript—as with any Lynch film, each camera movement and each scene has an almost intoxicating cohesiveness. Anything Lynch touches invariably retains his mark, and though disorienting, this film flows as if each sudden change was inevitable and visually necessary.
But what can be taken from this film plot-wise? Well, there's jealousy, loss of mental faculties, passion, murder, psychiatry and stories within stories. We begin to wonder what can be trusted if not our protagonist and her sensory experiences. But does this lead us to any conclusion? Not really; in fact, the final frames of this film will leave people feeling like they're less sure of the film than they were a half hour into it. But that isn't the point with something this experimental.
If you came away ""learning a lesson,"" you probably just made something up. This kind of film is about giving yourself over to the logic of nonsense, dreams and the subconscious. It's about connecting disparate pieces and seeing what rings emotionally true. It's about giving yourself over to a world that is entirely the creation of the director, yet somehow internally familiar.
With ""Inland Empire,"" Lynch has created another masterpiece, a film that warrants repeated viewings and takes its viewer to places that are confusing, disturbing and enthralling.
