The film is dazzling and bewildering in equal measure.
–San Francisco Chronicle
…yet another example of Lynch’s extraordinary collaboration with Dern. Possessing one of the great contemporary screen faces, Dern provides an unusually pliable muse, capable of being prim and dignified in one scene, lushly ripe in another and as grim as a Dorothea Lange portrait in yet one more.
–Washington Post
After garnering widespread and mainstream acclaim from 2001’s Oscar-nominated Mulholland Drive, the iconoclast, idiosyncratic visionary David Lynch returned with one of his most daring, experimental, and ambitious efforts yet. Inland Empire (2006) is led by Lynch favorite Laura Dern, alongside Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and Julia Ormond. This utterly unique, director-supervised restoration sees remarkable use of AI and cross-format transferring to resurrect and preserve this truly one-of-a-kind, surreal, lo-fi epic.
The original, 2006 synopsis: David Lynch’s labyrinthine Hollyweird freakout—his last feature to date—is his most uncompromising creation: a fugue-state trawl through the darkest realms of the subconscious that pushes his straight-from-the-id imagery and sinister dream logic to their extremes. When she accepts a role in a supposedly cursed production, a movie actor on the verge of a comeback (Laura Dern, in a fearless performance) finds herself tumbling down a series of increasingly disturbing rabbit holes (complete with literal rabbits) that lead her from the glittering heights of Tinseltown to the depths of human depravity. In his first feature shot on digital video, Lynch makes visionary use of the medium’s smudged textures and murky chiaroscuro to enhance the hallucinatory, nightmarish quality of what may be his magnum opus.
