In the past decade David Lynch has produced two perfectly accessible films without alienating his hardcore fans. The Straight Story was just that. Mullholland Dr. was, at heart, a fairly conventional 'it was only a dream/fugue state' soap plot. Here comes the curve-ball. Recent or casual post-Twin Peaks converts are advised to pack a head-scratching implement for the quagmire of Inland Empire.
One can rattle off plot details from the director's latest near-impenetrable fancy but they won't be of much use to the viewer seeking meaning. Nikki (Dern), an actress, is visited by a creepy Polish crone. This unwelcome visitor rants in a menacingly incoherent fashion and warns Nikki that her forthcoming role in the film On High In Blue Tomorrows will involve '"brutal fucking murder". We jump to the set of that film where Nikki meets her co-star Devon (Justin Theroux) and the director Thorpe (Irons). Everyone warns Nikki that Devon is a cad. We're told that On High With Blue Tomorrows is a cursed remake. The original stars "discovered something inside the script" and were murdered. Ex-girlfriends of either Devon or his character Billy Side appear and dance the Locomotion. A Polish woman cries over television static. Nikki sees something on the set which later turns out to be Nikki. She puts together a kind of camera obscura using a cigarette and tissue paper. Everything flips around. She walks into a hard-boiled office space as a white trash damsel in distress. She vomits blood on the Hollywood walk of fame. The letters AXX¡NN keep appearing. Other stuff happens. And then there's a monkey.
As oblique as this sounds, Lynch diehards should have fun putting all the pieces together. Dig deep enough and like most of the canon, its just a free-falling remake of Maya Deren's Meshes Of The Afternoon. Everyone has a Freudian double. Hell, the Freudian doubles have Freudian doubles. Trademark visuals - a red curtain here, a needle in the groove there - provide welcome familiar signposts. Rabbits, the director's online serial featuring humans with lapine heads and a jarringly inappropriate laugh track, finally reaches its conclusion. Liberated by cheap DV cameras Lynch is excavating all of his pet preoccupations. Inland Empire, his most experimental offering since Eraserhead, is giddily teaming with ideas. Inevitably, there's too much ocean and the project is hindered by a lack of focus and an smeary, ugly lo-fi aesthetic. Then again, blurring is something Lynch has always done terribly well.