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9.8/10
FilmFascination Rating
This has to be one of the most fucked up, terrifying movies I have ever seen. I watched Inland Empire a few days back and I was in complete awe. I have never had an experience like this while watching a film before, and mind you, I do watch a decent amount of movies. I’ve been in awe of Lynch’s work ever since I started his filmography with Mulholland Drive, which was also my first real brush with surreal cinema. But this? This is on another level entirely. Even after Lost Highway and Blue Velvet, I think Inland Empire is Lynch in his truest form: the film he was always building toward, his most ambitious vision finally given full, unfiltered shape.
An actress begins working on an unfinished Polish film rumored to be cursed. As production continues, the line between the film and her own reality starts to blur. I won’t explain any more than that. Maybe there isn’t anything more to explain. The film has some semblance of structure, sure, but it remains highly abstract, less a story you follow than a fever dream you’re pulled into, one that captivates you and scares the shit out of you in the same breath.
Lynch always believed you should feel a film before you understand it, and Inland Empire is built entirely around that idea. Anyone who’s seen his earlier work already knows the drill: for most of the runtime, you’ll be sitting there thinking “what the fuck is going on?” And that’s fine, because understanding was never the point. The point is the experience the film puts you through. I can say with confidence this is the most frightened I’ve ever been watching a movie. Dark alleys, quiet stretches suddenly broken by intense sound design, jump scares that land out of nowhere: every moment builds toward whatever the film has planned next.
And yet, for all its abstraction, the film never feels random. I don’t know if that makes sense on paper. Maybe it’ll click once you’ve actually seen it. Scenes that feel completely unrelated when they happen eventually start folding back into each other, and those connective moments hit like genuine flashes of Lynch’s genius. Try to picture the screenplay for something like this. It’s almost impossible to imagine how anyone decides on a structure this unconventional. But that’s exactly what makes Lynch, Lynch.
Laura Dern’s performance is a huge part of what makes the film so hypnotic. It might be her best work, and it’s certainly one of the most intense performances I’ve ever seen, period. It’s so committed, so raw, that I genuinely wondered if Dern (and everyone who made this with her) came out the other side mentally okay. No offense intended, that’s a compliment.
Visually, the film looks almost deliberately amateur. Lynch shot most of it handheld, himself, on a low-resolution Sony PD150 camcorder. It’s one of the most experimental productions imaginable, filmed without a finished screenplay, built scene by scene as Lynch figured it out. His then-wife Mary Sweeney, who edited most of his other films (though not this one), said that without a real script, nobody but Lynch had any idea what was actually going on.
What Lynch knows about the audience (and does so well with it) is that each frame introduced or each dialogue said no matter how confusing or fragmented it might be at the moment it is shown – remains in the audience’s mind. And when that fragment resurfaces later in the film – maybe by the same characters or not, sometimes in the same place, sometimes not- the audience does pick that up – connecting it with the previous idea which did not make sense at the time. That’s what makes the experience so singular. The film stays abstract throughout, but it’s dotted with these quietly beautiful instances of things clicking into place. It’ll probably take multiple rewatches to untangle the underlying metaphors buried in a scene or a line of dialogue. But no matter how much of it you actually understand, the experience will still move you to your core. Lynch was anyways not big on explanations or trying to clearly understand a film. He used to say that it’s up to the people to find their own interpretation. It doesn’t really matter what he thinks. When asked what Inland Empire was about, he simply said: “A woman in trouble.”
But after all that said, I’ll be honest: I really don’t think anyone except for Lynch fans are going to enjoy this film. If you haven’t sat with his other work first, you’ll come into this carrying the instincts of every other film you’ve seen, and you’ll fight the urge to make sense of something that isn’t interested in making sense. Most people need closure, a plot that resolves, a story that adds up. If that’s you, maybe steer clear of this one. But if it’s not, Inland Empire might just become your favorite Lynch film.
Inland Empire turned out to be Lynch’s final theatrically released feature, and unfortunately so. As closing statements go, this is about as strong as it gets: a wholly original work carrying every idea he’d been building toward since Eraserhead. But maybe we’ll never get something this original, this ambitious, ever again.
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