Strange, what love does.” The role of a lifetime, a Hollywood mystery, a woman in trouble . . . David Lynch’s first digitally shot feature makes visionary use of the medium to weave a vast meditation on the enigmas of time, identity, and cinema itself. Featuring a tour de force performance from Laura Dern as an actor on the edge, this labyrinthine Dream Factory nightmare tumbles down an endless series of unfathomably interconnected rabbit holes as it takes viewers on a hallucinatory odyssey into the deepest realms of the unconscious mind.

During the first rehearsal involving Nikki and the film's lead actor Devon, the actors are interrupted by a disturbance on the set. Devon investigates, but finds nothing. Shaken by the event, director Kingsley Stewart confesses that they are shooting a remake of a German film entitled 47, based on a Polish folk-tale. Production was abandoned after both leads were murdered, creating rumors of the film being cursed. But nothing is like anything else! So it’ll be your thing. And it’ll be her thing and their thing. That’s right.For Lynch die-hards, there is also the creeping sense of repetition. The ideas and themes of Inland Empire have been seen before throughout Lynch’s career. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but you do wonder if Lynch’s creative juices were at full flow during the production; the fact that he hasn’t made a film since (the triumphant Twin Peaks TV return notwithstanding) may be telling. This release, which includes notes about the restoration in the accompanying booklet, is of the “just the facts ma’am” variety, and you may not realize just how “magical” the work is that was put into the restoration unless you play the Absurda DVD immediately after. Skin tones are healthier and fuller, but the most noticeable and significant improvement is in terms of color balance and saturation, revealing so much more visual information in the images and without compromising Inland Empire’s low-res, subterranean power. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/oscar-campaigning-gets-quirky-inland-127246/ The disc then closes with the new trailer advertising the Janus restoration, and the included booklet then features an interview with the filmmaker excerpted from Richard A. Barney’s book David Lynch: Interviews, featuring the filmmaker talking about the experience of making the film, right down to editing all of that footage.

Newly recorded for this release is a 30-minute conversation between Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan that’s as warm and inviting as you may expect. Both reminisce about the times they’ve collaborated, together and separately, with Lynch, beginning with Blue Velvet. Dern discusses Inland Empire’s piecemeal shoot and Lynch’s “For Your Consideration” campaign on her behalf and how it went viral, while she and MacLachlan extol Lynch for his ability to consistently offer them “nets” throughout their collaborations. The Criterion Collection today released David Lynch’s divisive 2006 feature film, Inland Empire, starring Laura Dern, Grace Zabriskie, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Karolina Gruszka, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Harry Dean Stanton, and William H. Macy. David Lynch Announces Distribution Partnerships and Theatrical Release Dates for Inland Empire". PR Newswire. 15 November 2006. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 28 July 2015. Shortly afterwards, Grace begins to mentally deteriorate, taking on the personality of Sue Blue, the sex worker she plays in On High. Soon Grace can no longer successfully determine reality from scripted, which in turn leads the audience to debate the very narrative itself. Delorme, Stéphane (February 2007). "A Married Woman". Cahiers du Cinéma (620): 10–12. Archived from the original on 22 December 2010.Inland Empire was shot in SD 4x3 480i29.97 on DV tape. After being captured, the footage was edited in the same format in Avid. The footage was then converted to HD 16x9 1080p23.98 and input into Clipster for remote DaVinci 2K grading. During this process, a Teranex converter was used to treat video noise on selected shots. With the digital-intermediate (DI) master complete, it was output to 35 mm film and HDCAM-SR tape. At the time, fans and critics were still high off of Mulholland Drive, his dreamy tale of switched identities and the dark underbelly of Hollywood. Inland Empire felt like Mulholland Drive on steroids, and no one knew how to deal with it. I watched this Studio Canal, Region B Blu-ray disc last night. As I had noted of the Criterion Blu-ray in the INLAND EMPIRE 4K Restoration thread: "Of perplexing note for those interested is that the much-debated line about the 19/90-year old niece has been altered. It seems clearly intentional, and now plays as: "It's the, uh, niece..." The piece of dialogue concerning her age that should precede the word 'niece' has been removed." I've never worked on a project in this way before. I don't know exactly how this thing will finally unfold... This film is very different because I don't have a script. I write the thing scene by scene and much of it is shot and I don't have much of a clue where it will end. It's a risk, but I have this feeling that because all things are unified, this idea over here in that room will somehow relate to that idea over there in the pink room." [26]

Brody, Richard (11 December 2006). "Inland Empire: The Film File". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 7 March 2008. Michelle Yeoh Recalls ‘Emotional’ 2002 Cannes Jury Experience with Films Like ‘The Pianist’ and ‘Irréversible’ So to my surprise I was left so cold watching the film, it didn’t feel dark enough, the 4K upscale artefacts were distracting and the high resolution brought attention to the inconsistent camera work instead of all the shots flowing together under the veil of grain and saturated colours of the original. The film did just felt so disconnecting and I usually find it the scariest movie ever and it didn’t really do anything to me apart from a few scenes in the first hour. Maybe it was because I was with a friend who was watching it for the first time so I was hyper analysing it through them or being there with an audience but I’m not sure. Inland Empire". madman.com.au. Archived from the original on 31 December 2012 . Retrieved 13 August 2012.Perform a post-mortem on this three-hour beast of a film and you will find only half a heart beating inside its chest, but you will also discover innards that coil in more grandiose directions. Mulholland Drive, possibly the greatest work of American film art since Nashville, is an impossible act for Lynch to have to follow, but the bug-eyed director—pupils dilated and imagination tripping in almost inconceivable directions—has made the Atlas Shrugged of narrative avant-garde films, compulsively watchable and insanely self-devouring. Inland Empire (15)". British Board of Film Classification. 2 January 2007 . Retrieved 23 November 2012.

IndieWire: Revisiting a movie you made 16 years ago, as you’re making decisions about the remaster and those decisions and choices are being filtered through your taste, are you trying to stay true to the person and filmmaker you were when you made it, or does the movie transform into something new because you’re coming at it from a different perspective? Guillen, Michael (24 January 2007). "Inland Empire—The San Rafael Film Center Q&A With David Lynch". Twitch Film. Archived from the original on 7 September 2008 . Retrieved 21 April 2008. Premio Future Film Festival Digital Award – 65. Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica"[Future Film Festival Digital Award – 65. Venice International Film Festival]. Future Film Festival (in Italian). 5 September 2008. Archived from the original on 5 April 2012 . Retrieved 6 March 2013. T]he structure of Inland Empire differs from prior Lynch films, Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive. It is neither a Möbius strip that endlessly circles around itself, nor is it divisible into sections of fantasy and reality. Its structure is more akin to a web where individual moments hyperlink to each other and other Lynch films—hence the musical number that closes the film which contains obvious allusions to everything from Blue Velvet to Twin Peaks. Ross, Jonathan (5 May 2007). "Inland Empire review". Film 2007. BBC One . Retrieved 12 January 2023.When you do this remastering you have to spend so much time rewatching and relistening. I remember an interview where someone asked if working in one medium forbids developing another, and you said that in fact one thing is always feeding another. Of course you always talk about fishing for ideas, catching the fish. Do the remasters feed anything? Are you catching anything unique from them? In addition, there is a new conversation between Dern and her former Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks The Return co-star Kyle MacLachlan. They both wax poetic about their shared history with Lynch, and how their creative processes aligned. I would … shoot that scene, not knowing if it would ever hook on to any other scenes,” Lynch said in that same interview, “and not knowing if it would go, you know, wherever. I didn’t think about it.” Dern told reporters at the film’s premiere that she had no idea what the movie was about, but hoped that seeing it would help. Her co-star Justin Theroux said that trying to figure out what was going on in Inland Empire had become an on-set “pastime” for him and Dern. “I couldn’t possibly tell you what the film’s about, and at this point, I don’t know that [Lynch] could,” he said.