Critics reviews

The spare wide shots are exactly that, filmed and edited with an exciting, gleeful indifference. On the other hand, its barrage of close-ups that make up the body of the film proper, as expressive and incorporeal as Dreyer's in The Passion of Joan of Arc or Wiseman's in The Last Letter, strip INLAND EMPIRE of signifiers. The close-ups move closer to faces than almost ever before, and their DV blurriness creates its own effect.

An experience of total immersion and continual slippage, it feels like the product of a sustained, unedited brainstorming.

Even more directly than Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire is about the film industry's dark underbelly — how people are used and rejected by it. Lynch's treatment of Hollywood is even more excoriating, its descent darker and more surreal... Inland Empire requires more work on the part of the viewer to decipher its goings on than either of its two predecessors [of the Los Angeles trilogy], dealing as it does in vague dialogue like this, but in some ways it's also the most rewarding.

As in a dream, you can't always tell what you're seeing--or what it means. There is only the eternal now... Memory is as blurry as the degraded visuals. We're forced to squint between the pixels, trying to remember. Lynch marries this to a soundtrack that's arrestingly intricate, populated with all manner of industrial noises and hair-raising sound effects. It's an image/sound mashup as scary and bewildering as any nightmare. Seen in a darkened theater we're caught in its brilliant grip.

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.

David Lynch's new movie is many things, among them a sinister waltz through a So-Cal underbelly known as Inland Empire, a murder mystery, a film-within-a-hallucination-within-a-film-within-so-on, and the story of love affairs that span the boundaries of time, space, and reason. It is happening again, you may think (or dread—Lynch, after all, has his haters): a redux of Mulholland Drive, which is only half true.