Inland Empire

David Lynch’s labyrinthine Hollyweird freakout—his last feature to date—is his most uncompromising creation: a fugue-state trawl through the darkest realms of the subconscious that pushes his straight-from-the-id imagery and sinister dream logic to their extremes. When she accepts a role in a supposedly cursed production, a movie actor on the verge of a comeback (Laura Dern, in a fearless performance) finds herself tumbling down a series of increasingly disturbing rabbit holes (complete with literal rabbits) that lead her from the glittering heights of Tinseltown to the depths of human depravity. In his first feature shot on digital video, Lynch makes visionary use of the medium’s smudged textures and murky chiaroscuro to enhance the hallucinatory, nightmarish quality of what may be his magnum opus.

“The extraordinary, savagely uncompromised INLAND EMPIRE is David Lynch's first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films of 2006 that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse. Like Mulholland Drive, which this film resembles like an evil twin, INLAND EMPIRE involves an attractive blond actress who tumbles down rabbit holes inside rabbit holes inside rabbit holes. INLAND EMPIRE isn’t a film to love. It is a work to admire, to puzzle through, to wrestle with.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“My favorite film of the [New York Film Festival] and the year... Lynch's most challenging work since Eraserhead is a viscerally unrivaled love letter to the transformative powers of cinema that can't be controlled nor comprehended.” (Premiere)