Review of Inland Empire (2006) by Gavrilov E — 04 Dec 2011

I went in with an open mind on this film, I really did. After taking the whole second half of my film course on David Lynch and seeing more of his work, my opinion of him has indeed changed a bit. Blue Velvet is a masterpiece, Twin Peaks is brilliant, and Mulholland Drive is profoundly rewarding the second time you watch it. Wild at Heart is pretty interesting, Eraserhead is at least memorable, and maybe even Lost Highway wasn't quite as bad as I initially said it was. But honestly, Inland Empire, Lynch's last feature film (possibly ever), is basically just three hours of cinematic torture. I did not enjoy it on any level, and I suspect that watching it again would not be nearly as worthwhile as watching Mulholland Drive again. This is self-indulgent, nonsensical, aesthetically unappealing, way too long, and just damn hard to watch.

It's about an actress (Laura Dern). That's about all I can say for sure about the plot.

Laura Dern, for what it's worth, does put a lot of work into her performance. She's a good actress, and takes each scene seriously, but the movie falls apart anyway. Justin Theroux appears, though his character isn't nearly as funny or interesting as his one in Mulholland Drive. Jeremy Irons also does a good job as a movie director, but he's only in a few scenes.

This movie doesn't make any sense. Like, any. At all. None. This movie gives you nothing. There are random intercut scenes of a fake sitcom with people in rabbit costumes, which are actually taken from this other project Lynch made, and they make no more or less sense than anything else in the movie. Mulholland Drive appears to make no sense the first time you see it, but that movie is actually giving you clues all along without your realizing it, and when you watch it a second time you can put it all together and it becomes very satisfying. This movie does no such thing. There's no clues, and probably no mystery to solve, on any level. You can't even say it holds together on some sort of thematic level. It doesn't.

Plus, the movie is just really ugly to look at. It was shot on standard definition digital video, which for the most part just looks kind of crappy. It feels like a home movie, except worse. The lighting is literally the worst I have ever seen in any film. I'm sure that's intentional and you could say it has some sort of meaning, but that doesn't make it any better to look at. So much of the film is just too dimly lit to even see what's going on. At least in Lost Highway, the mysterious dark spaces were obviously deliberate, but here they almost just feel like the result of incompetence. Occasionally the movie bombards you with scary imagery and sound, which is indeed scary, but it's utterly divorced from any context or meaning. This might not be one of the worst movies I've ever seen (maybe it's brilliant on some level over my head), but it's definitely one of the ones I would be least willing to see again.