Inland Empire (film)

In a hotel room, a young prostitute cries following an unpleasant encounter with her client while watching a television show about a family of surrealistic anthropomorphic rabbits who speak in cryptic statements and questions. A gramophone plays Axxon N., "the longest-running radio play in history". Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) auditions for the lead role in the film On High in Blue Tomorrows. Nikki is visited by a Polish woman (Grace Zabriskie) who claims to be her neighbor. The woman tells Nikki "an old tale": a boy passed through the doorway into the world, causing a reflection that gave birth to evil that followed him. Then she tells "the variation": a girl was lost in the marketplace "as if half-born" while the alley behind the marketplace was the way to the palace. The woman predicts that Nikki will get the role, and asks her if her character is married and if the plot involves murder. Nikki denies both, but her neighbor disagrees.

The next day, Nikki celebrates having won the role as her husband Piotrek (Peter J. Lucas) watches her. Nikki meets the film's lead actor Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) and the two begin a relationship, though Devon is warned by his entourage that Nikki is out of bounds due to her husband's power and influence. Later, during a rehearsal, the crew is interrupted by a disturbance. Devon investigates, but finds nothing. Shaken by the event, director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) confesses that they are shooting a remake of a German feature entitled 47. Production was abandoned after both leads were murdered, creating rumors of the film being cursed. One day, Nikki finds a door marked "Axxon N." in an alley behind the set. Upon entering, she finds herself at the rehearsal weeks before, and she causes the noise that Devon investigated that day. Nikki escapes into the home of a character named "Smithy". Devon looks through the windows, but sees only darkness.

In the house, Nikki finds Piotrek in bed and hides from him in a closet, where she encounters a troupe of prostitutes who advise her to burn a hole through silk with a cigarette and look through the hole. Nikki complies and sees one of the film's characters, "Doris Side" (Julia Ormond), tell a policeman that she had been hypnotized by a man known as "The Phantom" to murder someone with a screwdriver, but finds the screwdriver embedded in her own side. A mysterious organization claims to have captives from Inland Empire. In 1930s Łódź, prostitutes are beaten by pimps while murder permeates through the city. Nikki, having become one of the group of present-day prostitutes, wanders the streets while her companions ask, "Who is she?" Nikki asks several men if they had met her. Meanwhile, Nikki's character "Sue" meets a policeman at a nightclub and tells him how she was abused in her childhood, which led to her prostitution, and how she is being pursued by a red-lipped man; Sue arms herself with a screwdriver in response. She also mentions her husband Smithy, a circus bear tamer with connections to both the pimps and the organization. Sue walks down Hollywood Boulevard and sees Nikki, but is attacked by Doris, who was hypnotized by the Phantom to kill her. Doris stabs Sue with her own screwdriver, and Sue falls at a bus stop, where two homeless women talk about a prostitute named Niko, a beautiful woman whose blond wig makes her look like a movie star, thus allowing her to walk through the rich district without drawing attention. One of the women holds a lighter in front of Sue's face until she dies. Kingsley yells "Cut!" and the camera pans back to show this has merely been a film scene.

Kingsley informs Nikki that her scenes for the film are complete. In a daze, Nikki wanders off set and into a nearby cinema, where she sees not only On High in Blue Tomorrows but events that are occurring. She wanders to the projection room but finds an apartment building marked "Axxon N". Nikki confronts the red-lipped man, now known to be the Phantom and shoots him. The Phantom transforms into a deformed version of Nikki, and then into a bloodied figure before dying. Nikki flees into Room 47, which houses the rabbits on television, though she fails to see them. She then meets the Lost Girl and they kiss. Nikki and the rabbits disappear in a white light and the Lost Girl escapes from the hotel and into Smithy's house, where she happily embraces her husband and son. Nikki, back at home, smiles victoriously at the Polish woman and finds a one-legged woman (Tracy Ashton) that Sue had mentioned, Niko the prostitute and a monkey. The end credits roll over a group of women dancing to Nina Simone's "Sinner Man" while a lumberjack saws a log to the beat.

When asked about Inland Empire, Lynch refrained from explaining the film, responding that it is "about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it."[11] When presenting screenings of the digital work, Lynch sometimes offers a clue in the form of a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad:

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.[23][24]

New York Film Festival official Richard Peña summarized the film as "a plotless collection of snippets that explore themes Lynch has been working on for years", including "a Hollywood story about a young actress who gets a part in a film that might be cursed; a story about the smuggling of women from Eastern Europe; and an abstract story about a family of people with rabbit heads sitting around in a living room."[11] The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw called the film "a meditation on the unacknowledged and unnoticed strangeness of Hollywood and movie-making in general", adding that Lynch "establishes a bizarre series of worm-holes between the worlds of myth, movies and reality."[25] Critic Mark Fisher wrote that the film "often seems like a series of dream sequences floating free of any grounding reality, a dream without a dreamer [in which] no frame is secure", but argued that "it is the film that is mad, not the characters in it ... it is Hollywood itself that is dreaming".[26] He also commented that "to see Lynch's worlds captured on digital video makes for a bizarre short-circuiting: as if we are witnessing a direct feed from the unconscious".[26]

Dennis Lim of Slate described the film as "a three-hour waking nightmare that derives both its form and its content from the splintering psyche of a troubled Hollywood actress", and commented on Lynch's use of digital video, describing it as "the medium of home movies, viral video, and pornography—the everyday media detritus we associate more with ... intimate or private viewing experiences than communal ones", adding that the film "progresses with the darting, associative logic of hyperlinks".[8] Scholar Anne Jerslev has argued that the film "constitutes multiple and fractured modes of perception in a world of digital screens".[27] Other critics have argued that the film features "formal similarities with a website's hyperlinked layering of screens/windows, constantly disclosing new worlds from new points of view", but according to theorist Steven Shaviro "it also builds on cinematic codes, even as it deconstructs them".[27] The scholar Delorme indicated that the film is about adultery, in a way that Lynch "avoid[s] a chronological unfolding of the scenes and situations provoked by the adultery", but rather "superimpose[s] them instead in as many scenarios developing from the potentials of the adultery", so that "[t]he narrative is constructed on strange characters brought together by a similar terror".[28]

• Inland Empire at IMDb
• Inland Empire at AllMovie
• Inland Empire at Rotten Tomatoes