INLAND EMPIRE is at times ugly, beautiful, boring and utterly captivating. Once the film begins, you submit yourself to a tour of Lynchland, spending fragments of time at familiar pit stops: a mystery devolving around a troubled blonde, characters from another world speaking in strange tongues, surrealist shifts in narrative, and the use of Hollywood as one big haunted house. The film is aurally all-encompassing, filled with a lush, organic wall of sound that sounds comprised of thousands of little electronic insects, buzzing in unison under Lynch’s careful orchestration.

Laura Dern plays an actress who lands a big role in a film that happens to be cursed. Soon she’s unable to tell the difference between “real” life and the character she is playing in the film. She confuses real names with names from the film, and develops feelings her character harbors. The mystery is that there’s a group of men who are controlling events – a strange mafia that happens to be involved with a traveling circus. There’s a murder involved.

The movie reminds me of jazz composition, with its lengthy exploration of non-narrative deviations from a main theme, itself orbiting around even more obscure narrative satellites. It’s like an orchestra of stories, and Lynch is the composer connecting the dots, but those connections are swaths of smoke instead of straight lines. That is what INLAND EMPIRE is: an orchestra of smoke – and mirrors. A masterpiece.