A man and a woman are glimpsed, in murky black-and-white images, in a Polish hotel room, their faces mosaiced out. "You want to f*** me?" she asks. "Shut up and take off your clothes," he answers. "I'm frightened." she says. Cut to full color and a girl wrapped in a red sheet, crying, and watching TV. Enter into her television; it's a strange, twisted kind of sitcom with three human-size rabbits sitting in a queasily colored 1950s-style living room. Their conversation consists of nothing but cryptic nonsequiturs: "Who could have known?" "What time is it?" "I'm going to tell them some day." Each utterance is met with raucous canned laughter. One rabbit walks out the door on the set; he enters an ornate room where two Polish thugs are having a conversation, and then he disappears.
Cut to Hollywood. Actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) is visited by a woman in grotesquely heavy makeup (Grace Zabriskie). "I'm the new neighbor," she says, and proceeds to quiz Nikki about a new film she might be starring in. "Is there a murder in your film?" she asks, with a disturbing insinuation. The conversation gets more and more bizarre, until the neighbor says, "If it was tomorrow, you'd be sitting over there." Cut to the next day, and sure enough, Nikki's sitting where predicted. The phone rings, telling Nikki she got the lead role in a film called "On High In Blue Tomorrows." It turns out, though, that's it's a cursed movie, based on an old Polish folk tale — in an earlier production, both the leads were murdered.
Welcome to "Inland Empire," David Lynch's longest, darkest, and definitely most twisted film yet. Lynch has created the cinematic equivalent of an Escher painting; think "Mulholland Drive," but imagine that as a mere warm-up for the acrobatic surrealism on display here. "Mulholland Drive" followed one story for about two thirds of the film, before shifting gears into an alternate reality — "Inland Empire" performs that trick not even 20 minutes into the film: Nikki Grace's world starts to dissolve, first between her "real life" and the world of the film she's in, then between dreams and dreams of dreams, all tantalizingly connected.