A Tribute To David Lynch, And His Most Underrated Film.

With The Passing Of Director David Lynch, It Is A Good Time To Pay Tribute To His Best Film.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Inland Empire (2006).

In some really sad news, the brilliant filmmaker David Lynch passed away at 78 years old.

For anyone who followed his work, you know he was one of the most creative, original, and brilliant filmmakers of all time.

In a sea of cliched and predictable Hollywood films, David Lynch made surrealist, unique masterpieces different from anything else.

An entire book could be written on David Lynch’s brilliance, but in this tribute, I want to focus on my favorite film of his.

If you ask anyone what David Lynch’s best work is, most will answer with films like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, or the Twin Peaks series and film.

These are all good answers, I love all of his films, and Twin Peaks is one of the greatest TV shows ever made with a great story and beautiful dream-like Atmosphere created by everything from its scenery to script to soundtrack.

However, to me, his magnum opus is one of his lesser-known films: his 2006 masterpiece Inland Empire

The film is David Lynch at his most Lynchian, not caring about appealing to mainstream audiences or listening to studio executives and creating the surreal nightmare he always envisioned.

David Lynch is known for his surrealism and metaphorical story-telling, but Inland Empire takes this to another level, making his other work look like straight narrative stories.

The film stars Laura Dern as Nikki Grace an actress who agrees to star in a film with a “cursed script” and finds herself trapped in a surrealist nightmare.

The film is genius on so many levels.

For one it is one of the creepiest films ever made. From the opening scene where a mysterious woman cryptically warns Nikki of the cursed script, to an inexplicably eerie choreographed dance scene to the song “Locomotion”, to the insertion of Lynch’s surrealist horror “sitcom” “Rabbits” to a creepy scene involving Laura Dern lunging at the camera, the film is able to create an uncanny and terrifying atmosphere throughout.

The film is able to create brilliant horror, not through conventional ways but through an eerie and uncanny atmosphere that gives the viewer the feeling that something is off.

In one of the final scenes, Nikki confronts “the Phantom”, the main villain of the film. After shooting him twice, his face transforms into a distorted version of hers.

The image is so perfectly uncanny that the scene is able to be one of the most unnerving and creepy in cinema history. Every time I have shown the film to friends and family, they always have a perfect “what the fuck” expression on their face during this scene.

Another way the film is genius is that it truly feels like a nightmare. Think about a bad or stressful dream you had. For most, you will likely remember something non-sensical that changes settings with no explanation.

This is exactly how Inland Empire plays out. Throughout the film, Nikki switches from an actress to a poor woman in Poland to a homeless woman living on the street.

The film’s setting switches from a mysterious house to a snowy landscape in Poland at night to an outdoor barbeque in broad daylight.

The random switch in character and setting throughout the film is the most accurate representation of a dream or nightmare ever put into film. Watching it truly feels like a fever dream put on screen.

Another incredible element of the film is the fact that it was filmed on a handheld digital camera, making it feel like you are watching some long-lost documentary footage.

The contrast between the almost mockumentary style of filming and the surrealist and trippy nature of the film gives it this brilliant contrast that makes the wild events seem even more real.

Some were off-put at the time because of the film’s surrealist and nonsensical plot, but in today’s world of cookie-cutter stories and nonstop remakes, there is something incredibly refreshing about seeing a filmmaker like Lynch make the bizarre and surrealist film he always wanted to without caring what mainstream audiences would think.

Furthermore, the more times you watch this film the more it makes sense. Like most Lynch films it creates a surrealist world that doesn’t follow the laws of the real one, but with more watches the more the surrealist nightmare world of Inland Empire makes sense, making it easier to follow.

Throughout his career, Lynch often faced studio interference preventing him from truly fulfilling his creative vision.

For example, Lynch never wanted to reveal who Laura Palmer’s killer was in “Twin Peaks” but was forced to by Studio head Bob Iger who argued “the audience needed to know who killed Laura Palmer, or at least receive some indication that the storyline would be tied up”.

Studio interference often prevented Lynch from creating the ambiguous and fully surrealist work he always wanted to. However, with Inland Empir,e he financed a large chunk of the film out of pocket with some additional funding from the French company Studio Canal. Lynch also bought the DVD rights and was able to distribute the film himself.

This gave him complete creative control to finally make the surrealist film he always wanted to in Inland Empire with nothing spelled out to the audience and most of the film left up to viewer interpretation.

For casual filmgoers, this would be a massive turnoff, but for fans of surrealist horror films (like myself), it makes the film all the more mysterious, exciting, and intriguing to watch.

The ambiguous nature of the plot also makes this one an easily rewatchable film as I find myself coming away with a different interpretation of the themes and plot on each viewing.

This also makes the viewer empathize with the main character more and get further sucked into the movie. The film’s tagline is “A Woman in Trouble” and throughout the film, Nikki (Laura Dern’s character) is more confused and terrified by the increasingly surreal events surrounding her. Throughout the film, Nikki has the exact same unnerved and confused experience as the viewer making it a much more immersive experience.

The film is certainly not for everyone, but for fans of Lynch the film is an eerie, surreal, creepy, funny, and fascinating masterpiece and one of the most original and in my view greatest films of all time.