David Lynch's first film since the award-winning "Mulholland Drive" is a complex Hollywood mystery which blurs the lines between fantasy and reality.
David Lynch's latest film is perhaps his most stunning and puzzling voyage into the subconscious realms of dreams, fantasies, and mysticism. "Inland Empire" is structured as a dense concentric ring of mysteries, each one leading not to answers but to still more mysteries. A washed-up actress (Laura Dern) lands a rejuvenating part in an Old South romance, but finds out that there are darker undercurrents behind the film's story. A Polish prostitute is murdered, and maybe lives on as a spirit. A poor woman is trapped in an unloving marriage and tries to escape into infedelity -- or is this just a part being played by the actress who's played by Dern? What is the connection of all this to a bunch of affectless humanoid rabbits living in a sitcom parody? Such paradoxes and unresolved questions lie at the heart of this film, and in a sprawling three hours, Lynch does little to make the solutions easier to find. One senses there are answers here somewhere, but it's hardly important to sort them all out right away. The best way to experience "Inland Empire" is to let its imagery wash over you, taking in the way it simultaneously critiques and channels the cliches of Hollywood moviemaking. Lynch is totally at home when he's exploring the human subconscious, and here he's made a film that seems to be the direct product of that subconscious, a kind of waking dream that hardly ever seems to follow the logic of the conscious mind. What's important is the web of connections and associations at play here, and the way the beautiful visuals suggest the myriad levels to this dream world. Dern's performance seemingly fragments a single woman into all sorts of offshoots and roles and doppelgangers, and it's a true tour-de-force workout for her, an emotional rollercoaster of pain and redemption. As always, entering Lynch's strange dream world is a challenge -- maybe his greatest challenge yet -- but it's definitely a rewarding challenge too.
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David Lynch drama. Lynch breaks a long silence with a challenging piece of cinema about an actress going through some psychological trauma on the set of her latest film. Laura Dern plays Nikki Grace - an ingénue actress whose latest role - in a Tennessee Williams-esque fright of a film tests her to her limits. The director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) is a cloying, creepy character. Grace is falling for her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) but if that was the central plot, this wouldn't be Lynch-land, would it? A parallel storyline shows an earlier attempt to make this film in Poland which ended in tragedy when the two lead players were offed. It's just shy of three hours of David Lynch at his eccentric, unpredictable best.
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