INLAND EMPIRE

The role of a lifetime, a Hollywood mystery, a woman in trouble.... David Lynch’s final feature - and his only film shot digitally - makes visionary use of the medium to weave a vast meditation on the enigmas of time, identity, and cinema itself. Featuring a tour de force performance from Laura Dern as an actor on the edge, this labyrinthine Dream Factory nightmare tumbles down an endless series of unfathomably interconnected rabbit holes as it takes viewers on a hallucinatory odyssey into the deepest realms of the unconscious mind.

"Now it’s dark, in the immortal words of the psychotic Frank Booth—really fucking dark—and it is unmooring not to have Lynch around to help us feel our way through the darkness. Lynch was fearless, and utterly unselfconscious, when it came to tackling the biggest, vaguest, most all-consuming themes, the most primal and least articulable; he approached them more seriously and sincerely than many others could, with curiosity, wonder, and a healthy dose of sick humor. Countless artists have sought in their work to confront or to deny death, and Lynch did both, in ways that transcended the sentimental commonplace. He was committed to making us feel the shape of absence, the slow and deranging time of bereavement, and he rejected narrative closure as the worst kind of death—one that left no possibility of a lingering afterlife. There is a sense in which Lynch has been preparing us for this moment all along. We will be taking the measure of this loss for some time. For now, we can be grateful that he knew in his bones that art stands a better chance than we all do against mortal rules." - Dennis Lim