Inland Empire

Inland Empire (2006) begins with an actress learning that the film she has joined is cursed. Then the question of who is who starts coming apart. Nikki Grace and the character she plays, Sue Blue, blur together, rooms open into other rooms, and for three hours the film refuses to resolve. Lynch shot it handheld on a Sony DSR-PD150, in low resolution digital video. It was his first entirely digital feature, and he said afterwards that he would no longer use film. There was no screenplay. Lynch wrote scene by scene across three years and handed the actors a few freshly written pages each day. Nobody knew what the finished thing would be. At the Venice premiere Laura Dern said openly that she did not know what the film was about or what part she was playing. Lynch ran a campaign of his own for her Oscar nomination, sitting on Hollywood Boulevard beside a live cow and a poster of Dern. She was not nominated. It cost three million dollars and made 4.4 million. It runs 180 minutes. Good for: Lynch, films that refuse narrative, and formal experiment. Less good for: three hours with no explanation. The image is deliberately coarse and some scenes are visually distressing. Following the characters is not possible; the film asks to be endured rather than understood.