Inland Empire
Starring: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux
Director: David Lynch
The film: Running almost three hours, Inland Empire is David Lynch's longest film. More importantly, it's also his most grotesque, lyrically sprawling and captivating work since the similarly harrowing Eraserhead propelled him to fame in 1977. Lacking a coherent storyline, Inland Empire is noir-meets-thriller writ large, as if Lynch is revisiting the darkest corners of his oeuvre before blowing them up to unrestrained, epic proportions.
With its focus again on an actress navigating a psychotic nightmare on Sunset Boulevard, Inland Empire is obviously a companion piece for Lynch's last film, Mulholland Drive. But after the first half hour - during which Nikki Grace (Laura Dern, right) is recruited to a production, which the director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) explains as being cursed and where Grace is to have a fling with her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) - the film goes into complete narrative meltdown.
What follows is a mind-bending omnibus of overlapping strands, with Grace apparently playing a character in Stewart's film but also emerging as very different personas throughout. The film's tagline, A Woman in Trouble, is very apt: Grace is always in dire straits but viewers can't be sure who the 'woman' she plays is, whether it's a woman struggling with a destitute Polish husband to being a crazed prostitute on the edge.
