2006 film by David Lynch
Inland Empire is a 2006 film written, directed, shot, edited, and scored by David Lynch, who produced it alongside Mary Sweeney. The film stars Laura Dern as a Hollywood actress who begins to take on the personality of a character she plays in a supposedly cursed film production, causing fragmented and nightmarish events to unfold. It has defied categorization, with its genre being variously interpreted as drama, experimental, horror, fantasy, mystery, neo-noir, psychological thriller, and surrealist.
A co-production between the United States, France, and Poland, Inland Empire takes its name from a Californian metropolitan area. It was completed over a three-year period, shooting primarily in Los Angeles and Łódź. The process marked several firsts for Lynch: the film was shot without a finished screenplay, instead being largely developed on a scene-by-scene basis, and was filmed entirely by Lynch on low-resolution digital video with a handheld Sony DSR-PD150 camcorder.
The cast includes frequent Lynch collaborators such as Dern, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and Grace Zabriskie, as well as Jeremy Irons, Karolina Gruszka, Peter J. Lucas, Krzysztof Majchrzak, and Julia Ormond. Brief appearances are made by additional actors including Terry Crews, Laura Harring, Nastassja Kinski, Diane Ladd, William H. Macy, and Mary Steenburgen. The voices of Harring, Naomi Watts, and Scott Coffey are also heard in scenes where characters watch excerpts of Lynch's short online horror series Rabbits (2002). The soundtrack features a variety of musicians such as Beck, Dave Brubeck, Kroke, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Nina Simone.
Inland Empire premiered at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival, where Lynch was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. In a publicity stunt intended to increase Dern's chances of nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, which was ultimately unsuccessful, Lynch chatted to bystanders on Hollywood Boulevard while sitting in a director's chair placed between a live cow and a large poster of Dern. The film grossed $4.4 million on a budget of around $3 million.. It was named the joint-second-best film of 2006 by Cahiers du Cinéma, and was listed on Sight and Sound's films of the decade, as well as The Guardian's 10 most underrated movies of the decade. The film was remastered by Lynch and Janus Films in 2022. Lynch died in 2025, making Inland Empire his final feature film.
Plot summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.