Inland Empire

Lore & Background

Completed over a three-year period, Inland Empire 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.

In Their Own Story

The film opens with a crackling vinyl record announcing that 'Axxon N., the longest-running radio play in history', is turning to 'a gray winter day in an old hotel'. In a hotel room, the Lost Girl—a young Polish prostitute—has an unpleasant encounter with a client. Her face is blurred. After the encounter, her face becomes clear. She turns on the television and goes channel surfing, seeing an old Eastern European woman approaching a mansion before she flips to a show about anthropomorphic rabbits. She begins to cry. In Los Angeles, actress Nikki Grace is waiting for the results of her audition for the lead role in the film On High in Blue Tomorrows. The old woman from the television screen visits her mansion and tells 'an old tale': a boy passed through the doorway into the world, causing a reflection that gave birth to an evil that followed him. The woman is certain that Nikki will get the role and insists that despite Nikki's claims to the contrary, the plot involves murder. During the first rehearsal, the director confesses that they are shooting a remake of an unfinished German film entitled 47, itself based on a supposedly cursed Polish folktale. Production was abandoned after the two leads were found murdered 'inside the story'. After filming the first few romantic scenes, Nikki starts having difficulty distinguishing between the film script and real life. She walks into an alley and enters a door named 'Axxon N.' It leads to the On High in Blue Tomorrows set, but also takes her back in time. Nikki realizes that she was the disturbance Devon investigated during the first rehearsal. She runs away and enters a set piece, which turns into an actual house. Inside the house, Nikki sees her husband going to bed. She hides from him in a closet, which transports her to a living room inhabited by a troupe of prostitutes. At this point, the narrative disintegrates into various plotlines and scenes, with the chronological order and the distinction between characters unclear. In the climax, Nikki wanders off set and into a nearby movie theater, where she sees not only On High in Blue Tomorrows but events occurring in real-time. She follows the bespectacled man upstairs and enters an apartment marked 'Axxon N'. Confronted by the Phantom, Nikki shoots him. The Phantom transforms into a grotesque figure with a face resembling Nikki's before dying. Nikki flees into Room 47, which houses the rabbits on television – though she fails to see them – and then meets the Lost Girl. The two women kiss and embrace, and Nikki fades away. The Lost Girl escapes from the hotel and into Smithy's house, where she happily embraces her husband and son. Nikki is back at her mansion. The film ends with a celebration involving the troupe of prostitutes, a one-legged woman mentioned earlier, Niko and her pet monkey, and others. The women dance to Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman', while a lumberjack saws a log.

Reader's Guide

When asked about Inland Empire, Lynch refrained from explaining the film, responding that it is 'about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it.' When presenting screenings of the digital work, Lynch sometimes opened with a loosely-translated version of the Mundaka Upanishad: 'We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.' New York Film Festival official Richard Peña summarized the film as 'a plotless collection of snippets that explore themes Lynch has been working on for years', including 'a Hollywood story about a young actress who gets a part in a film that might be cursed; a story about the smuggling of women from Eastern Europe; and an abstract story about a family of people with rabbit heads sitting around in a living room.' The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw called the film 'a meditation on the unacknowledged and unnoticed strangeness of Hollywood and movie-making in general', adding that Lynch 'establishes a bizarre series of worm-holes between the worlds of myth, movies and reality.' Critic Mark Fisher wrote that the film 'often seems like a series of dream sequences floating free of any grounding reality, a dream without a dreamer [in which] no frame is secure', but argued that 'it is the film that is mad, not the characters in it ... it is Hollywood itself that is dreaming'.

Did You Know?

• Inland Empire was shot entirely by David Lynch on low-resolution digital video with a handheld Sony DSR-PD150 camcorder.
• The film was completed over a three-year period and was shot without a finished screenplay, instead being largely developed on a scene-by-scene basis.
• In a publicity stunt intended to increase Laura Dern's chances of nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, 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 was named the joint-second-best film of 2006 by Cahiers du Cinéma.
• Lynch died in 2025, making Inland Empire his final feature film.