Sadly Over-hyped

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

After devouring the incredible journey that was Twin Peaks: The Return, I went on the hunt for more things Lynch. Inland Empire is probably his most obtuse and difficult film, yet I must admit that I enjoyed it. I won't pretend to you that I had any single clue about what was going on for the majority of the feature, and whilst at times it did come across like a student film (you can thank the use of the Sony PD-150 for that) I was left feeling very unsettled at the conclusion.Simply put, nobody does dream sequences or dream worlds like David Lynch, and considering this entire film blurs the lines between dream and reality from beginning to end, this is the ultimate expression of that art-form. The budget is minuscule, but you will be left questioning what is real, and what it is that really matters, if anything. Laura Dern is excellent, as usual, and there is a pure- Lynchian (sorry to use that term!) scene where she gets stabbed with a screwdriver, and the people around her continue the most morbid conversation, in the most nonchalant way. It is hard to describe, you just have to watch it to see how twisted it is.

Let me preface this by saying that not only am I very familiar with Lynch's work, but I've loved every movie of his that I've seen and the only ones I haven't seen are "Wild at Heart" and "The Straight Story". I even watched the entirety of "Twin Peaks" and loved it. "Inland Empire" is just too much."Inland Empire" starts out seemingly on the same track as "Mulholland Drive". That is to say, an actress hoping for a big break who gets caught in an endless downward spiral of crime and guilt, and for most of the movie, even after it gets absolutely nuts, this seems to be what the movie is going for (emphasis on "SEEMS", because there is no way of really knowing with this one). The thing is, this movie has no real plot, no consistent characters, no space, no time, and as far as I'm concerned, nothing in it is reality, but it's never truly clear. And it's three hours long.What the movie descends into is an absolute nightmare. I can say with certainty this is the weirdest film I have seen, and it's probably the scariest one too. Usually the latter would be high praise, but with this one... I don't know. This movie really, genuinely unsettled me, and it probably has done the best job of any film to recreate what it actually feels like to be in a nightmare. Everything about this film just feels wrong. The way it is shot, with these poor quality digital camcorders, usually uncomfortably close to people's faces with an ultra wide angle lens, distorting their faces. There are full scenes in a foreign language without subtitles. The mic quality isn't that great, there'should no studio lighting (or lighting of any kind for that matter. I don't know if this one was intentional, and frankly it made me laugh, but it has horribly bad sound effects for people being hit, and that is probably just a flaw, but honestly I couldn't tell. It just generally doesn't look or feel like a movie... even for Lynch it's absurd.Here's the thing: I can appreciate the movie for how it made me feel, considering no movie has ever made me feel that way, but at the same time it was really just not enjoyable. Usually I can love movies that make me feel really sad, or afraid, even though those are negative emotions, because I can appreciate the filmmaking aspect that was required to make me feel that way. No one would say "Schindler's List" made them feel good, but many of the people who watch that film love it. So when I say it wasn't "enjoyable", I also mean that it was just too bizarre and unorthodox to truly be able to analyze the specific filmmaking aspects, and there were no characters or symbolic imagery to analyze either. I roughly understood the themes and felt the mood of the film, but that was about it. This is what makes it different than other Lynch films: all the rest of his films take place in psychological landscapes, but are grounded in reality, and it's possible to find this in "Mulholland Drive", "Eraserhead", and even "Lost Highway" in my opinion.I do not exaggerate when I say that I did not want to watch this film during it's last hour, not because I thought it was necessarily bad, but I just really didn't like the way it made me feel, and there was even a moment near the end of the film where I stopped watching for a few minutes because the film made me feel so strange and anxious.The film has the unique feeling that literally anything could happen at any moment. The only thing truly consistent about the film is its mood, which can only be described as a nightmarish fever dream.In short, I have mixed feelings about this strange amalgamation.Edit: It's been a day and I haven't stopped thinking about it since I finished watching it. I still don't really know what I think about it, but no movie has had this effect on me before, so I bumped the score up to a 7/10.Edit: Been three days. In retrospect, I think this was kind of great in its own way.

The 3 out 10 I rated this film is for the performance of Laura Dern; when she was given a chance to play a recognizable human character doing credibly human things, she was excellent. If there is any sense to be dragged out of this movie, it's because she put it there. In most other respects, it failed to impress.It gives me no pleasure to say this, because I very much like most of Lynch's other work. I have a feeling that IE is the movie that Lynch always wanted to make, but was at least to some extent constrained to follow the conventions of mainstream film-making by the studios. In IE, however, the brakes are off. It's as if the studio bosses said: "Go on David, do whatever you like." And, oh boy, he did. What we've ended up with seems to be a jumble of all the least comprehensible bits of his other movies, all stuck together in no particular order.Even though we haven't always been able to follow the plot of Lynch's films -- if they even have one -- we could generally rely on exquisite visual artistry. IE, however, lacks even that. I'm told that it was filmed on a mid-priced camcorder; I don't know if that's true, but it surely has the worst technical cinematography of any serious movie ever made by grown-ups. I assume that this is intentional -- it takes work to make something this unappealing. I mean, a bunch of school-kids with a Handycam will sometimes succeed in creating a scene that is properly lit and in focus, even if by accident.And the characteristic, understated humour of Lynch's other films also seems to be missing here -- it's relentlessly grim and gloomy from start to finish.If this movie had been made by anybody other than Lynch, I would have given up after fifteen minutes, and just assumed it was a heap of self-indulgent, pseudo-intellectual nonsense. But because I know that Lynch can make a great film, I toughed it out. I'm not at all sure it was worth it.

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.