At this point, things get weird in ways that I leave for you discover (indeed, if you have not seen the film before), partly to preserve the surprises. But no mere review could possibly hope to explore all the seemingly inexplicable story points and thematic elements in remotely adequate detail—one would need an entire book to do that (and there a number of those, including a recent monograph from critic Melissa Anderson). Even then, you might only be scratching the surface of what Lynch is offering up here. I concede that when I first saw the film at a press screening in 2006, I liked it enough but it did not completely register with me. I saw it again a month or so later and for whatever reason, it clicked with me that second time. At this point, I would place it alongside “Eraserhead,” “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,” and “Mulholland Drive” as one of Lynch’s finest works, even if I cannot quite explain why I love it as much as I do. The movie is so dense with imagery, ideas, and sheer audaciousness that you might think the only thing it’s possibly missing is Nastassja Kinski sitting enigmatically on a sofa while a group of women lip-sync and dance to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.” On a wholly unrelated note, be sure to stay during the closing credits.
Like the previous films in Lynch’s so-called Los Angeles Trilogy, “Lost Highway” and “Mulholland Drive,” notions such as time, space, and identity are obliterated to the point in “Inland Empire” where characters suddenly become other people, locations and timeframes change with equal abruptness, and the City of Dreams becomes an endless night from which it seems impossible to awaken. In the earlier films, the split between the dream and real worlds are reasonably hard and fast, though perhaps only really so in retrospective. Here, Lynch smears the line dividing the two practically from the start, both metaphorically and literally. The latter is thanks to his decision to shoot the film on digital video, giving it a visual style that is both familiar and oddly disconcerting and leaves you constantly trying to get your bearings.
The problem is that while this stylistic approach makes for any number of haunting and unnerving visual moments, it made the film somewhat of a hard slog to watch for three solid hours back in 2006, and while the subsequent DVD that Lynch put out was presumably state-of-the-art at the time, it has not exactly stood the test of time. For this re-release, Lynch and Janus Films have put “Inland Empire” through a long and detailed remastering process of the audio and visual components (Lynch also did the film’s hair-raising sound design) to arrive at a new 4K transfer. Although there’s only so much improvement that can be done given the source material, it looks about as good as it is ever will. When this version of “Inland Empire” hits Blu-ray (presumably via Criterion, who have done bang-up jobs on a number of Lynch films already), it should come across quite nicely.