Film

You could do worse than think of Inland Empire as David Lynch’s Block Party—a career summation, an actors’ reunion, and a chance (thanks to the filming ease of digital video) for the director to put less distance between inspiration and finished product. Working a variation on the dream-film-life vortex of Mulholland Dr., Empire is full of in-jokes; indeed, only the extreme faithful might recognize the common denominator between Axxon N. and Four Seven, the cursed movie that actors Nikki Grace (Dern) and Devon Berk (Theroux) are remaking.

Empire follows Dern’s character(s) from the film set to Hollywood Boulevard, from a mansion to a split-level, from watching others (and herself) to being watched. There are detours into Poland and a sitcom living room filled with rabbits, and a musical coda that should send viewers out shimmying, like Twin Peaks’ Man From Another Place.

The movie flirts with the ostensible incoherence of Mulholland and Lost Highway, but the structure isn’t random. Empire may be the closest Lynch has come to a critique of his own tools. Characters are variously shown staring at a TV, standing in a movie theater and peering through cigarette-burn peepholes. The Polish scenes evoke the texture of decaying film stock. A squid-ink bullet wound matches icks with the best of Eraserhead.

More successfully than anything Lynch has done, the movie creates the sense that one’s own mind is fissuring. It teases, haunts and swallows you with its nightmares, even on repeat viewings. If that’s not one definition of a great movie, we don’t know what is.