Let’s just say that David Lynch’s subconsious is not a pretty place, that the intimations of violence, sex, reincarnation, misogyny, dream and nightmare wrapped up in dark cynicism about Hollywood and an ostensible American dream can make for unhinged theatre. Abstract and elliptical, this is anomie and alienation distilled.

Half the battle with a film like Inland Empire is making it through the film. It’s long. It’s disjointed and for the first hour my brain was jumping back and forth trying to connect characters and plot that aren’t supposed to connect. This can be frustrating and exhausting and also dreamlike. Somewhere between marriage, infidelity, hollywood and rabbits there are themes. I wouldn’t see this movie again, but I’m glad I saw it. I think.

On the continuum of narrative conventionality, let’s put Blue Velvet on the “essentially straightforward narrative” end. Inland Empire goes all the way down on the other side. (Mulholland Drive is on the 2/3 mark towards Inland Empire, and Lost Highway is between those two, and closer to Inland Empire.)

The easiest way to try and “make sense” of Inland Empire is to think of it in much the same way that you think of your dreams when you wake up in the morning. A does not follow on logically to B, but they’re linked through your subconscious associations. Inland Empire is David Lynch and Laura Dern’s dream, rendered on cinema, and that’s what strings the seemingly disparate and incomprehensible elements together.

All that being said, if you’ve got no patience for that sort of thing, give this a miss. Longtime fans of Lynch may find themselves frustrated or bewildered, but not disappointed.