I love surrealism. It's my favorite form of art. From Dali and Magritte, to Luis Bunuel, David Cronenberg's more outlandish work, Terry Gilliam's unique fantasies, and Jodorowsky's mind-trips, I can't get enough. Surrealism is, to me, the ultimate art form. And for my money, nobody does it better than David Lynch. If you look at my reviewer profile, you will see that I list Blue Velvet as the movie that truly opened my eyes to the possibilities of filmmaking. But my love of Lynch extends far beyond one film. I own all of his short works, and every film of his from Eraserhead to Mulholland Drive, with multiple copies of certain ones. I've read books on him, watched his appearances on Leno; I even paid for a membership to his website, where I saw some intruiging things and made some good friends. So, it's safe to say, that for me, a new David Lynch movie is always a milestone event. Even when critics panned one of his pictures, it always had a mysterious hold on me and ended up becoming a beloved work of art in my mind. So it was that last night I finally found myself with the time to see his latest, Inland Empire.

Now, with that previous paragraph in mind, read the following words carefully:
Inland Empire is a terrible film.

There, I said it. I, for whom David Lynch could do no wrong, am telling you to avoid Inland Empire.

How could things have gone so wrong? Mulholland Drive was a high point in Lynch's career, one of the few times critics and audiences mostly agreed that he had made a masterpiece. Sure, there were some who didn't get it, but in time even the naysayers realized the subtle nuances of construction and dived through the layers of meaning to come out with a better understanding of what Lynch was doing. It was a work that only a master filmmaker could do. Perhaps it got too much acclaim, because Inland Empire feels like the work of a film student who believes his work has gotten "too commercial."

Laura Dern stars as Nikki Grace, a fading movie star who is yearning for a part in a high profile picture. She's visited by a neighbor (Grace Zabriskie of Twin Peaks and Big Love) and is warned that her getting the role will not be all sunshine and roses. Nonetheless, Nikki does win the job, and gets to work. Her co-star, Devon Berk (Justin Theroux), is warned against trying to sleep with her, as her husband is powerful and could kill him. Despite this, the two end up sleeping together anyway, at which point Nikki becomes confused as to whether she is an actress or the character she is actually playing. This is the launching point for the rest of the film, which is essentially a series of surrealistic images with no point or purpose.

Now, again, remember that I say nothing about this film lightly. I've stuck with Lynch films long after even other Lynch fans have abandoned them as hopeless, so for me to say that the imagery in this film has no point, I mean it. It almost looks like Lynch is making fun of himself in more ways than one. Aside from the imagery that is cliche Lynch, he does something he's never done before: repeat himself. Now, I can tell this has been done deliberately, as there are moments in the film that recall every single one of his other movies except for Dune, which he has disowned. But despite that, I have never seen a Lynch film where he willfully takes the time to do something he's done before again. And yet, here, he throws in references left and right. And it's not just shots or imagery. His re-using of actors that he hasn't worked with in years is another sign to his nostalgiac intentions. Aside from Dern herself, who we last saw with Lynch in Wild At Heart, there's Grace Zabriskie, cameos and voices by Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts, Harry Dean Stanton, and even Laura Dern's mother, Diane Ladd. Then, Lynch tops even this by throwing in scenes and images from his various website project, from a family of rabbits trapped in a sitcom to a man sawing a log. It's frustrating and creatively bankrupt.

Perhaps if Lynch had called the film "David Lynch's Home Movies" or "Just Kickin' It With David Lynch" I wouldn't have disliked the movie so much, but the fact that he's trying to pass the movie off as a serious work of art, when it's clearly a gag movie, is frustrating. And let's not even go into the similarities in tone and sometimes in plot to Mulholland Drive, which is so far above this film in quality that it's almost sad. No, I amend that. It is sad. What we have with Inland Empire is the result of one of the greatest filmmakers of our time backsliding into a creative regression so terrible that the end result is almost unwatchable. Now, granted, there are some scenes that are good, and some that are actually excellent. The sequences in Hollywood are filled with a lot of humor, which really works. During the "Laura Dern freakout" scenes, a group of girls show up in her house, acting as something of a Greek chorus: making comments, showing off their tits, dancing to "The Locomotion," and more. These scenes are easily the best in the film, as they're utterly unlike anything Lynch has done before and feel new and fresh. The problem is that they have no connection to anything else. The film feels like a collection of unrelated scenes where the only thread tying them together is that the same actors appear in them. It's a tired, lazy film that has pretensions of high art but wouldn't even pass muster at a film school level.

It breaks my heart to say this, but Inland Empire is not worth seeing. Skip It.

Daniel Hirshleifer is the High Definition Editor for DVD Talk.