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Inland Empire
EMAILPRINT518 Media Inc. / Absurda
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 86 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Mystery
Written by: David Lynch
Directed by: David Lynch
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 6, 2006
Running Time: 172 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / Poland / France
Language(s): Polish / English
Summary
RATING: R for language, some violence and sexuality/nudity
Starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton, Justin Theroux, Scott Coffey, Grace Zabriskie, and Diane Ladd
The latest hallucinatory vision from the iconoclastic director of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks," Inland Empire stars Laura Dern in a tour-de-force performance as, perhaps, an actress who lands a dream role that quickly devolves into nightmare. (IFC Center)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Blue Velvet Lost Highway Lynch Mulholland Drive The Straight Story Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Wild at Heart
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
TV Guide Ken Fox
In the end, it's best to make peace with the film's essential and deliberate inscrutability -- something Lynch fans have learned to do since Twin Peaks -- and to simply marvel at Dern's astonishing performance, which few actresses are likely to top anytime soon.
Read Full Review >Premiere Aaron Hillis
Inland Empire is interchangably terrifying, maddening, shockingly hilarious and perversely exciting, and that's just to those who end up disliking it.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Don R. Lewis
While I did enjoy the ride I took with the film, after the lights came up I was just thrilled Lynch was allowed to create such a journey for us to go on. Imagine what the cinema world would be like if more great directors threw caution to the wind and followed their artistic vision. It's a world I'd like to see and I hope Lynch continues to pave the way.
Read Full Review >Empire Damon Wise
A dazzling and exquisitely original riddle as told by an enigma, featuring a superb, multi-layered performance by Laura Dern.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
David Lynch's first digital video, almost three hours long, resists synopsizing more than anything else he's done. Some viewers have complained, understandably, that it's incomprehensible, but it's never boring, and the emotions Lynch is expressing are never in doubt.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
It is Lynch's most experimental endeavor in the 30 years since "Eraserhead," that it will do nothing to draw new fans to the director's work and that, after two viewings, I cannot wait to see it again.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
One of the few films I've seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
My advice, in the face of such hallucinatory brilliance, is that you hang on.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
Only David Lynch could make the incomprehensible so compelling.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego
The film is dazzling and bewildering in equal measure.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Those willing to give themselves up to Lynch's sensibilities will find a hypnotic and richly textural experience that challenges them to make their own connections through the imagery, echoes of repeated dialogue and metaphor.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
It may not look like anything he's done before, but Inland Empire joins "Mulholland" and the whatzit "Lost Highway" (1997) to form the strangest show-business triptych around. All three concern artists whose identities demand more than one body. The films give new meaning to the phrase "dual citizenship."
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
David Lynch's Inland Empire left me grasping for the merest crumbs of comprehension.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
By the time Inland Empire, David Lynch's three-hour digital epic shot on a home video camera, takes you through its tour of the contents of the director's febrile imagination, it's probably the bunnies you'll most remember.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
If anything, it's worth watching as yet another example of Lynch's extraordinary collaboration with Dern. It may be overstating things to call her performance heroic, but it's nothing if not brave, as she dares to embody Lynch's most brutal impressions of Hollywood -- not as a dream factory, but as the place where dreams come to die.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
Shot on grainy, often blown-out and distorted consumer-grade video, scored to a feedback distortion-heavy soundtrack that will be familiar to fans and tinnitus sufferers alike, and clocking in at one merciful minute under three hours, Lynch's much-anticipated follow-up to "Mulholland Drive" signals a hale swan-dive off the deep end, away from any pretense of narrative logic and into the purer realm of unconscious free association. I found myself pining for "The Elephant Man," but that's just me.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
Ultimately, Inland Empire left me angry at David Lynch, but it was the kind of intimate anger you feel when disappointed by someone you love. If you can tolerate its lack of narrative cohesion, Lynch's film will continue to reward you with visual and auditory surprises right up till the end.
Read Full Review >Variety Jay Weissberg
Inland Empire may mesmerize those for whom the helmer can do no wrong, but the unconvinced and the occasional admirer will find it dull as dishwater and equally murky.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Inland Empire is way, way beyond my powers of ratiocination. It's the higher math.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Inland Empire is Lynch's most experimental film since "Eraserhead." But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr."), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma. Cheap DV technology has opened Lynch's mental floodgates.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
What is Inland Empire - which Lynch is understandably distributing himself - about? What is it trying to say? If you figure that out, let me know.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Over time, though, with films such as "Lost Highway" and, to a lesser extent, "Mulholland Drive," Lynch's movies became less personal and more private. Whatever he is working out in his new film, Inland Empire, it's beyond the reach of all but his idolators.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Inland Empire is so locked up in David Lynch's brain that it never burrows its way into ours.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.3 (out of 10) based on 86 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Neil L gave it a10:
Now that the critical dust has settled (love it or hate it, as always), this film stands out as Lynch's most complex, troubling and perverse work. For that feat alone it deserves the highest score possible. It will continue to fascinate and perplex.
Derek C gave it a9:
I'VE BEEN LYNCHED! - Bad, inevitable joke, but also fitting. One has to trust Mr. Lynch to sit through a film like this. What does one do with the grotesque in this film, as in his others? How about the evil, the innate self-destructiveness and pathetic cluelessness of mankind? There is no such thing as a happy ending in a Lynch film, despite appearances to the contrary. We're put through an intriguing, in your face nightmare. What does one do? Oddly enough it is possible to enjoy it. As a fan of Alain Resnais films, which are typically cryptic and challenging, I consider David Lynch to be the next generation of his school transplanted and grown in America. Inland Empire is so buried in the current American psyche it is startling. It digs right down to its twisted and self-strangling roots. Our culture is incomprehensibly bizarre. Inland Empire reflects that and leads you to feel like a victim of our own country's behavior. It's the undercurrent spirit of the age, increasingly so as time continues past the release date of the film. Then there are the parallels of the film inside the film inside the mind of the lead character that take place in Poland. Surprise America. Mankind has been there and done that before elsewhere in the world. How do humans entertain themselves? Persistently. Perennially. We don't just invent 'American' dreams. We consistently insist upon inventing dark games of deceit, sex and intrigue. Like it or not, we all make Lynch films of our lives. And we find it entertaining in the moment of each moment's birth. What are we? Why are we so dark? Why has mankind alone invented evil? With a bit of cinematic magic and flash, David Lynch dares put us through a hall of mirrors in an attempt to find out. The challenge: find the thread of sanity that holds us together. To Lynch fans, surviving the journey is worth the knowledge of understanding. Can we learn from our mistakes? Can we grow?
Venlkat R gave it a4:
I thoroughly appreciate the fact that Lynch has experimented with this film in a way he hasn't done with any other. However, it is extremely private and the viewer is lucky to understand anything (if at all). Lynch admitted to having no script and instead handing over to each actor several pages of dialogue each day. Ultimately, the movies spirals down into an endless abyss of meaninglessness, and drowns in self-preservation. Work of art:yes, avant-garde:yes; but unless you are a hardcore Lynch fan , or love abstract art this movie is definitely not worth a watch. You will be left alienated, and would have rather spent them staring at a blank wall.
Dee S. gave it a10:
PLOTLESS!!!! Are you joking? Are you in denial? Revisit the film people. Sit down and watch the first 45 minutes. Then turn off the film and reflect. Inland Empire is one of the most brilliant expositions of infidelity that has ever been committed to the screen (be it TV or Film). Not only that, but he goes even further and implies all sorts of nasty bits with respect to the Hollywood assembly line that we know so well and love. If you can wrap your mind around this idea - the fact that a film like this is trying to bypass your tendency to rationalize and going straight for the subconscious- then you can begin to understand what's going on here. The characters for the first 45 minutes are practically speaking in code. The code is the revelation of the subconscious. And people who disagree with this are just too comfy in their own heads, with their inflated egos. POWER TO THE ID (and that's not identification papers as some of you might think), PEOPLE. The truth is in the ID.
lado s gave it a5:
David Lynch, you have been filming the trashing, brutalising, sexualising, of the feminine for a very long time. Men came from Eastern Europe with that reality and made Hollywood. They brought the degradation of the feminine with them and it continues. You are now in a destructive loop with it. Instead of obfuscating, name the thing and stand up for it. But you can't name it or they will rape you and crucify you. Read your feminist literature and take a stand, David, before its too late. Too late for you. It would be sad to see a feminist man go down. We need your sensibility but not your obfuscation of the truth.
Frankie B gave it a1:
This is by far the worst movie I´ve ever seen and for sure the worst movie Lynch has ever made. This flick is just so trivial and weird, moving here and there, making no sense at all, not entertaining at all. I nearly turned it off after about 20 minutes, because it sucked so hard. Lynch used to make so great films, like Mulholland Drive, a masterpiece. But this time, he totally messed it up, might be due to a massive misuse of narcotics, I suppose. It took me all my manly toughness to watch this flick to the end, after 90 minutes I was just praying to the almighty father he shall show mercy to my tortured soul and let this horrible movie end at once. I would have rated it 0, but due to compassion I leave 1.
THAT MOVIE GUY gave it a10:
This is the type of movie that is impossible to give a perfect score review to, w/o sounding like a pretentious, art snob elitist. Simply because, this movie is so avant-garde, and so different from 99% of other independent movies, not to mention all the mainstream movies we all watch, that you can't compare it to much, except Lynch's own body of work. INLAND EMPIRE at a superficial level, could be called "Mulholland Drive" gone all "Eraserhead" with no "Twin Peaks". But really, it's just David Lynch's first full on subconscious trek of imagination, since Eraserhead. Just pure creativity, instead of setting up a linear story, lynch's "Picasso-esque" style, of throwing fragment of plot lines around, and then distorting their shape and importance later, gives EMPIRE an ability to impact the engrossed viewer, has honest to God, NEVER EXPERIENCED BEFORE! This movie is not LIKE a dream, it IS a dream. You leave the theatre confused as to what you saw and felt, as much as you try to hold on to the pure magic of those moments, that came like a surprise birthday party, out of the blue. I do not think David Lynch is the greatest film maker around or anything like that, but I do think he's ONE of the greatest around. However, I think his skill and the type of wild movies he makes are not totally interconnected. To me, Lynch JUST HAPPENS to make avant-garde films, like Aphex Twin just happens to make electronic music. In a parallel timeline, Lynch might be making some of the best Spielberg type movies around, and Micheal Bay makes really pretentious art films that ONLY snobs like (isn't that what Transformers is anyway? one big blur of color?). Anyway, seeing this movie in theaters was absolutely magical for me and the 2 friends i saw it with. I hope you have a similar experience.
