I am alone. I cry.
In front of me is a screen that transmits stories, but in reality, it's fixed on that shadowy white, crossed by multiple frenzied dots, as if they were people crossing the street.
"Inland Empire" begins.
It begins with shades of rarefied grayish white covering the faces of two unknown characters speaking in silence. Even in these simple shots, in the miraculous and intense long takes, the chills begin. I cry even more.
Lynch, undisputed master, has once again managed to tear my heart apart. He did it with kindness, unsettling and destroying me. The cold and stylistically à l'avant-garde capture of his digitalism pushes his golden fingertips deep into my perverse soul.
A film that is captured art, like a butterfly flaunting its beauty and then being destroyed by a net. Art captured and expressed on celluloid.
Those are the images so macabre, unsettling, unexpected, immobile that shocked me the most: three hours glued to the television screen with drool at my mouth.
This isn't the usual cheap art that's hard to understand and makes the most retrograde intellectual want to jerk off, it's not the stuff that baffles the audience and critics but of which no one dares to speak ill. This is a delirium born from the pleasure of making cinema and that simultaneously is cinema in all its being. That to many, "Inland Empire" might seem just an epileptic fury of senseless images, well, that's simply sterile relativism, purely unconscious.
Laura Dern, with her expressions so distressing they unsettle me, has become my goddess for a full three hours of film, which is a disturbing and overwhelming extrasensory experience, rooting itself in the human subconscious.
Incredible is the fact that in front of those 172 minutes of pure cinema the viewer cannot react: they are incapable: losing orientation from the first 40 minutes and never finding themselves again, lost in an abstract and irrefutable limbo. Labyrinthine, vampiric, disconnected, sophisticated. Beautiful.
Now I just wait for someone to emerge from my frenzied and badly tuned television and kiss me.
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Other reviews
By easycure
Where, therefore, a film like ‘Mulholland Drive’ inspired a type of projection... ‘Inland Empire’ drags in a totally abstruse operation that doesn’t inspire, but rather demands that the viewer, at all costs, finds something in it.
Lynch remains one of the greatest directors around... But it’s something that suits aesthetes, who probably won’t notice that as the film entirely loses the thread of the plot.
By Galakordi Urtis Krat
The cinema of David Lynch requires an audience without expectations.
Everything, absolutely everything, in terms of plot, is explained in the dialogues.
By poetarainer
A game of overlaps and digressions seemingly devoid of a narrative 'plot'.. the compass of the filmic story.
The viewer can never be passive: they must extract and weave the threads of an intricate and polysemous plot on their own.
By C.H.A.R.L.I.E Nokia
With Inland Empire, Lynch removes the subject as a unique entity to make room for the plurality of sensations.
The film states clearly that true and false do not exist and have never existed; only death exists.
By LKQ
"David Lynch is not what transpires from his films or his paintings. The artist-Lynch and the person-Lynch are two completely separate entities."
"It's so exciting when you fall in love with ideas... And getting lost is wonderful."