A blonde actress is preparing for her biggest role yet, but when she finds herself falling for her co-star, she realizes that her life is beginning to mimic the fictional film that they're shooting. Adding to her confusion is the revelation that the current film is a remake of a doomed Polish production, 47, which was never finished due to an unspeakable tragedy.
Inland Empire is, as with so many of Lynch's movies, a meditation on the unacknowledged and unnoticed strangeness of Hollywood and movie-making in general, though I am bound to say that it does not have anything like Naomi Watts's marvellous "audition" scenes in Mulholland Drive. The director's connoisseurship of Hollywood, his anthropologist eye for its alien rites, are however as keen as ever.
Lynch is entranced by the straight movie-making world: he loves the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - something awful happens here on Dorothy Lamour's star - the rehearsals, the shooting, the cutting and printing and checking the gate, and he loves the spectacle of actors walking contemplatively beside enormous sound-stages, for all the world as if they are in Singin' in the Rain. Yet he finds something exotic and bizarre in it; these qualities are not superimposed on normality, however; he finds the exoticism and bizarreness that were there all along.
dir: David Lynch
Year: 2006
country: US
run-time: 3h
rating: 15
Full £6.00
Concession: Pay What You Can
Doors 19:30 - Film 20:00