Review: INLAND EMPIRE (2006)

Director:  David Lynch

Stars:  Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Grace Zabriskie

Younger readers might not appreciate how long the gap between Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE felt at the time. The agonising anticipation for what might follow. In spite of the immense critical success of the former (which garnered its director an Oscar nomination and currently sits in the Sight & Sound top 10 films of all time), David Lynch’s inimitable artistic style still caused financiers to baulk. Bankrolling new projects was never a sure thing. Meanwhile, forever the tinkerer, artist and craftsman, Lynch kept himself busy experimenting with handheld DV, creating numerous shorts for his website. He liked the texture of it. The harshness. The closeness. The freedom. Reconnecting with frequent collaborator and friend Laura Dern, Lynch began envisioning a self-made project with a shoot split between Poland and the US; his deepest dive yet into the nightmare subconscious that had already proved to be a lifelong fascination.

Hypnagogic jerk is the sensation of falling people sometimes experience when drifting off to sleep. Few films feel as much like an uncontrolled descent as INLAND EMPIRE. Dern plays various gradations of waning actor Nikki Grace, who is married to a powerful if mysterious Polish man named Piotrek (Peter J. Lucas). Nikki still longs for another chance at stardom. Landing the lead role of Susan Blue in an ill-fated Southern melodrama opposite Hollywood Lothario Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), Nikki finds the lines between reality and fantasy quickly blurring. For Lynch, his Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole is a cigarette burn through a sheet of silk; an opening through which Nikki cascades into uncertain histories where her personality fragments with that of her character.

You can try your best to hold on fast as you can, but INLAND EMPIRE persistently wriggles free. What unfurls is onion-like, representative of a series of psychological layers. Nikki/Susan regresses into the murk of performance, at her most self-loathing core recasting herself on a down-trodden yet resilient sex worker, possibly because her guilt over an extra-marital affair has splintered her personality. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE work well as a loose ‘identity trilogy’. Where the first two can be fashioned into (relatively) neat narratives, the latter sprawls and splats. At three hours it’s almost too large and unruly. Tying it all to a sense of logic – even dream logic – becomes frustrating, and quite possibly fruitless. As Lynch would surely counter, his works are meant to be felt rather than understood in any rigid sense.

Here – more than in any of his other features since Eraserhead – Lynch found the freedom to collage his inventions. Facets of his nightmarish web series Rabbits are repurposed as a TV show watched by the mysterious Lost Girl (Karolina Gruszka) whom Nikki/Susan is compelled to free from evident captivity, seemingly to redeem and re-centre herself. If the Lost Girl is a manifestation of her former innocence, her predator – the entirely sinister Phantom (Krzysztof Majchrzak) – represents all that is violent, exploitative and controlling; a maverick epitome of human ills.

Gruelling as it can be, Dern’s performance is the phenomenal hub of it all. She dives headfirst into the character(s), opening doors of self-loathing that she flings herself through fearlessly. It’s a grubby delve; figuratively and literally. Lynch infamously campaigned for her consideration at the ensuing Oscars, sat on Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea with a billboard and a cow. That she was not nominated (presumably because of the out-and-out weirdness of the project) constitutes one of the more conspicuous snubs of the era.

Compared to Peter Deming’s sleek 35mm cinematography that bundled Mulholland Drive up in velvet, INLAND EMPIRE‘s harsh DVCAM imagery is grimy and brutal, even as it conjures a palpable atmosphere all of its own. Remastering something so roughshod to 4K might sound like an oxymoron, but sharpening these qualities intensifies Lynch’s vertiginous descent, conveys a renewed rawness to Dern’s performance. Sometimes pixelated and relentlessly ugly, you might even boast that its the worst its ever looked.

The major enhancement is to the always-important sound design masterminded by Lynch himself. Harrowing hollows and swirling pools of disquieting synth. This was an era of musical experimentation from Lynch. The intervening years between INLAND EMPIRE and Twin Peaks: The Return saw the auteur drop whole albums of material. His “Ghosts of Love” is an itching, disturbed counterpoint to past Lynch-penned themes like Blue Velvet‘s serene “Mysteries of Love”. Those mysteries have become traumas, both spectral and dangerous.

I saw INLAND EMPIRE three times at the cinema on its original run (indicative of the voracious appetite for new nuggets of weird from this viewer); something I couldn’t imagine putting myself through now. The film sits as a hostile dirge, a worried final(?) cinematic feature from it’s creator, and the darkest of his burrows into the subconscious. Though it ends on a rapturous high, the road there is long and treacherous, and repeat viewing feels increasingly exhausting. For those new to Lynch, this is a daunting gauntlet to run. Impressive, vast, dark and uncompromising.