INLAND EMPIRE

David Lynch never makes it easy for you, does he? His movies, for the most part, cause as much head-scratching as they do chin-stroking and INLAND EMPIRE is a chin-stroker's dream. The barely-there plot centres on the remake of a film starring Nikki Grace (Dern) with womaniser Devon Berk (Theroux) and directed by Kingsley Stewart (Irons). Nikki, prior to shooting, has been told by her strange Polish neighbour that the movie is cursed and these suspicions are confirmed by producer-type Freddie Howard (Stanton), telling the cast that the original unfinished film saw its two leads die in mysterious circumstances. It's around here that the plot finishes up and the final two-thirds of the film are spent inside Dern's head. It's one thing to try and expand the audience's mind and offer something completely different from the norm, but asking us spend three hours inside David Lynch's mind is asking a lot. For the first hour, INLAND EMPIRE, shot in low definition grainy video, does its best to hold onto to some kind of narrative thread (bar the sporadic talking rabbit sitcom, of course) but once it kicks off, it's Mulholland Drive cubed. Is it art? Or is it art for art's sake? Or is Lynch just making films so he can have a private chuckle at the reviews? It's anyone's guess, really. Lynch does go miles out of his way to make it hard for the audience and INLAND EMPIRE really pushes the boundaries of patience. In taking five years to deliver the film only to be forced to distribute it himself, Lynch has dedicated himself to making something other than the ordinary and he must be applauded for that - but does he really have to make films that are increasingly anti-story and anti-audience? You might not get what's going on in INLAND EMPIRE (I certainly didn't), but you can't deny it's visually interesting stuff. At times.