2008 Woodie Awards
Lynch's tangled plot works well
Adam Dompierre
Issue date: 9/6/07 Section: Entertainment
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"Inland Empire" is every bit as funny, terrifying, confusing and beautiful as a great David Lynch film should be. The film, now out on DVD, is Lynch's follow-up to his 2001 masterpiece "Mulholland Drive," and he somehow manages to take schizophrenic pacing and direction to a whole new level.
The plot itself is convoluted at best, and totally indecipherable at worst. The film's tagline -- "a woman in trouble" -- is about all the viewer really knows for sure. "Empire" continuously switches genre, from comedy to murder mystery to art house impressionism, but there is always a dark sense of foreboding that adds a real terror to the movie. The film opens with a disturbing Polish folk tale about evil: A boy passes through his door, causes a reflection and evil is born. Evil follows the boy.
Laura Dern ("Jurassic Park") gives a fantastic performance as Nikki and Sue (it's impossible to tell where one ends and the others begin), and Lynch campaigned for an Oscar nomination on her behalf.
The other characters pass by without much effect, and they exist only as a backdrop for Nikki's (Sue's?) descent into darkness. Throughout the movie Lynch cuts to scenes of three people in rabbit suits, complete with nonsense dialogue and inexplicably a canned laugh track.
The narrative is pretty straightforward for the first 45 minutes or so, centered around the production of a cursed movie, "On High in Blue Tomorrows." But things break down quickly, and the last two hours are as confusing as anything Lynch has ever done. The onslaught of sound and image makes "Mulholland Drive" look tame by comparison, and the movie becomes genuinely frightening.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, Lynch understands that there are plenty of things scarier than onscreen violence, and he instead relies on dark rooms, an unnerving soundtrack and his non-linear story to create fear in the viewer. The incoherent story actually works to his advantage, because watching it gives the impression that literally anything can come next.
The plot itself is convoluted at best, and totally indecipherable at worst. The film's tagline -- "a woman in trouble" -- is about all the viewer really knows for sure. "Empire" continuously switches genre, from comedy to murder mystery to art house impressionism, but there is always a dark sense of foreboding that adds a real terror to the movie. The film opens with a disturbing Polish folk tale about evil: A boy passes through his door, causes a reflection and evil is born. Evil follows the boy.
Laura Dern ("Jurassic Park") gives a fantastic performance as Nikki and Sue (it's impossible to tell where one ends and the others begin), and Lynch campaigned for an Oscar nomination on her behalf.
The other characters pass by without much effect, and they exist only as a backdrop for Nikki's (Sue's?) descent into darkness. Throughout the movie Lynch cuts to scenes of three people in rabbit suits, complete with nonsense dialogue and inexplicably a canned laugh track.
The narrative is pretty straightforward for the first 45 minutes or so, centered around the production of a cursed movie, "On High in Blue Tomorrows." But things break down quickly, and the last two hours are as confusing as anything Lynch has ever done. The onslaught of sound and image makes "Mulholland Drive" look tame by comparison, and the movie becomes genuinely frightening.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, Lynch understands that there are plenty of things scarier than onscreen violence, and he instead relies on dark rooms, an unnerving soundtrack and his non-linear story to create fear in the viewer. The incoherent story actually works to his advantage, because watching it gives the impression that literally anything can come next.
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