I’m a sucker for films I don’t understand, especially when they end with Nina Simone.

A very confusing movie! I would start to catch onto some of the story for about 10-20 minutes, then I would be lost again. Laura Dern’s conversation with her new neighbor was both stilted and confusing. The woman claimed to be introducing herself to her new neighbors. Then she would go on a prophetic bent or start a story – and bounce between everything.

I think I spent most of the movie with a confused “what the” expression on my face.

It took about 30 or 40 minutes for it to start working for me, but then it clicked and I was absorbed into the strange, dreamlike world that David Lynch creates with Inland Empire. Confusing at first, but then the dream logic started to make sense, but just like a dream, it can sound pretty incoherent when you start to describe it to someone. The film is shot on digital video and is built around Laura Dern who plays an actress in a film that is apparently a remake of a film of a Polish story that is cursed. But that doesn’t even scratch the surface and it’s not very plot-oriented, but it’s hauntingly familiar in some ways and it actually seemed simpler to understand than Lynch’s previous film, Mulholland Drive.

The film loops around and folds in upon itself which makes it hard sometimes to tell where something ends or begins. As Laura Dern’s character says at one point:

bq. It’s a story that happened yesterday, but I know it’s tomorrow.