The Globe and Mail's Liam Lacey didn't much like it:
Without any real sense of a coherent agenda behind the obsessive themes of doubling, velvet-curtained entertainments and pervasive decay, Inland Empire is less self-indulgent than self-parody, a bucket of Lynchian leftovers, stirred slightly and left to ferment in the dark.
Back in December, the NYT's Manohla Dargis liked it a lot:
... The extraordinary, savagely uncompromised “Inland Empire,” his first feature in five years, his first shot in video and one of the few films I’ve seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse.
And I like what the Toronto Star's Geoff Pevere had to say:
As it drifts narcotically between various scenarios, states of mind and rooms furnished in vintage Lynchian mustiness, Inland Empire keeps daring you to regard it as a puzzle (like the similarly Hollywood-set mind scrambler Mulholland Drive) that holds somewhere in its dark corridors – and around its multiple dark corners – a solution. And you can certainly look at it this way, but therein surely lies madness – a kind of shortcut to precisely the state of shattered mind to which Dern seems doomed.
At least on first glance.
Having only seen Inland Empire once – and therefore woefully unqualified to judge whether it might all snap together like a Rubik's cube after subsequent encounters – my advice is to simply surrender to its irrational allure. If you can achieve a state of trancelike submission that synchs with the protagonists' own, you're far less likely to let the movie – an amazing and unshakeable experience – drive you nuts.
I suspect if I went back through his previous reviews of Lynch movies, I would find that Mr. Lacey doesn't much like Mr. Lynch.
If I did the same thing with Ms. Dargis and Mr. Pevere, I'd find much the same pattern -- they liked him before, and they like him now.
And so it will be with you. If you're already a fan of Lynch, then take in Inland Empire (playing at the Royal on College St.). If you're not a Lynch fan, or if you require a highly logical, linear narrative, this might not be your cup of tea.
Personally, I am a big fan of Mr. Lynch (with the exception of Wild at Heart). While I wouldn't call Inland Empire perfect, I would gladly play money -- my own, if necessary -- to see it a second time in a theatre.
