INLAND EMPIRE
(Rhino Entertainment, 2006)

By Nick Louras
 

Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace, an actress who lands the lead in a film called, On High In Blue Tomorrows. As production begins, the director (Jeremy Irons) confides that the movie is in fact a remake of 47, an unfinished German film that was cursed, resulting in the deaths of its leads. Nikki is quickly drawn into a labyrinthine mystery, spanning time and location. She and her co-star (Justin Theroux) begin an affair, apparently against their own wills, and alternate between themselves and the characters they’re portraying. Meanwhile another plotline, set in Poland, presumably representing the earlier attempt at filming 47, becomes intertwined with their story.

Dern plays another, unnamed, character in a third plotline that is eerily similar to the other two and everything seems to be tied to a Polish teenager, credited as “Lost Girl,” who is alone in a dingy hotel room, watching a surreal sitcom about people in rabbit masks.

David Lynch’s most recent film is also, by far, his most challenging work since Eraserhead. Building upon the structural language of his earlier films, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, it eschews traditional narrative and character restraints to an even more radical extent. As with the latter pictures, INLAND EMPIRE is about the repercussions of karma echoing through the world and the lives of its characters. A fundamental story of love, infidelity, jealousy and murder is repeated, again and again, each time trapping and binding different characters (sometimes played by the same actors, sometimes not) in subtly altered situations.

It may take several viewings to fully appreciate (no quick task at 180 minutes) but those willing to make the effort will be richly rewarded. INLAND EMPIRE is a stunningly beautiful movie, its imagery at once ominous and hopeful. There are moments that are genuinely terrifying (Dern’s final confrontation with the Phantom character, for one) but as its heroine ascends through levels of karmic purgatory, the film leads to an ending that is quietly sublime.

The DVD includes interviews; trailers; Lynch 2, a continuation of Lynch (one) the fascinating documentary about the director that was recently released in theaters; and a featurette wherein Lynch is filmed by a documentary crew as he demonstrates how he cooks quinoa and tells a sweat story about traveling through Europe in his youth.