Inland Empire

"It's a story that happened yesterday, but I know it's tomorrow," says Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), a famous Hollywood actress who has just taken a demanding role in a possibly cursed film, to her co-star Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) during a break in a read-through. "That doesn't make any sense," he responds. No, not unless you give yourself over to director David Lynch's decidedly metaphysical approach to cause and effect. Riding a figure-eight narrative, we watch Grace go on a journey of metamorphosis, a shifting existence of multiple identities that crisscross, collide, and finally blur together while even stranger stories about Polish gangsters, scenes from a surreal sitcom in rabbit suits, and spontaneous dance numbers fill in the edges. The languid pacing and ambiguous events of the nearly three-hour production are confounding and dreamy, like nothing else coming out of Hollywood. If you are willing to lose yourself in Lynch's sensibilities, you'll find a hypnotic and richly textural experience that challenges you to make your own connections through the echoes of stories and imagery and odd dialogue. Jeremy Irons plays the director of the film within the film, Lynch regular Grace Zabriskie is a Polish neighbor whose appearance seems to throw Nikki's life into a new reality, and Harry Dean Stanton and Diane Ladd co-star.

Not only did Lynch produce the film outside the Hollywood system, he produced his own "2-Disk" (his spelling) DVD release, overseeing everything from mastering the film to producing his own slate of supplements. There is no commentary track, of course, as Lynch steadfastly refuses to explain his films or offer his own interpretations of elements, but he offers his own version of such DVD essentials as deleted scenes and the making-of featurette. "More Things That Happened" offers 75 minutes of deleted footage edited into a surreal sister film of its own, the scenes connected by music and rhythm more than narrative coherence, like a dream film companion piece. "Lynch 2" features 30 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage of Lynch, shot by the director of the upcoming documentary "Lynch [One]." "Stories" could be Lynch's answer to a commentary track, with 41 minutes of Lynch filmed against a red curtain (of course) talking about all sorts of things, some of it even related to "Inland Empire." Also features the Lynch cooking show "Quinoa" (think Julia Child noir), the dreamy "Ballerina," stills and trailers.