Movie Review: Inland Empire

Drama, Thriller, Horror, review

Sep 17, 2008 Ken Alexander

This is indeed a film for hardcore Lynch fans. If you're not see it but beware. If you're not familiar with Lynch, he wrote and directed such films as Wild at Heart, Lone

movie Review Inland Empire (2007)

Genre: Drama, Thriller, Horror

Directed by David Lynch

This is indeed a film for hardcore Lynch fans. If you’ve not see it beware. If you’re not familiar with Lynch, he wrote and directed such films as Wild at Heart, Lonesome Highway, Blue Velvet, Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive and was the creator of the Twin Peaks series. Inland Empire is yet another voyage into the unexplainable, the unimaginable and the grotesque. He is the only filmmaker whose movies you have to watch twice before you can even begin to understand them. Mulholland Drive, his most recent film before Inland Empire, was a mixture of reality, unreality, dream sequences that you weren’t sure were dream sequences. There were flashbacks to alternate realities, hideous images and mysteries never solved. Hey, I think I just described Inland Empire.

This movie has a “star studded” cast with Laura Dern playing the protagonist, surrounded by Justin Theroux, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton and Terryn Westbrook. Cameos included Naomi Watts (star of Mulholland Drive), Diane Ladd, Ian Abercrombie and William H. Macy.

So the story goes: An actress (Dern) had auditioned for her biggest role. She is forewarned by a neighborhood witch that something is not right, but she is projected immediately into the role and into the future of the next day. As she finds herself falling for her co-star (Theroux), she realizes that her life is beginning to mimic the fictional film they're shooting. She also finds out that the current film is a remake of a never finished production, which was halted due to an unspeakable tragedy.

As the flick continues, we are introduced to the bizarre characters that inhabit this rabbit hole of adventure including a television sitcom featuring humans in bunny suits with canned (or real) laughter at the wrong places, a strange psychological personage in a dark office up a long flight of stairs, a houseful of dancing streetwalkers, menacing characters of all types that as a result we guess, contain some of the images that doomed the former film. The film, like all good Lynch, is a series of scenes, seemingly unrelated to each other, but visually satisfying. Trying to put the puzzle together is half the fun in this and other Lynch films.

Nevertheless, the film will grab your attention if nothing else. If you like the macabre, the dark, dark humor, the ironical, the satiric, the intricate complexities and imaginations of the human mind that dwell secretly within all of us normal men/women (so the Dern character thought she was) this film will be enjoyable to you and terrifying at the same time. The acting and the ending are superb. The directing is Lynch. The story is unintelligible but compelling. And if you’re looking for the preverbal happy ending you may or may not find it here but you will leave the theater (DVD) shaking your head.

The film is rated R for language, some violence and sexuality/nudity. It was released in limited venues and is available on DVD.

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