Inland Empire (2006)

“It’s kind of laid a mind fuck on me.” Laura Dern drops this non sequitur after the second hour in “Inland Empire,” a film that sees Mad Hatter filmmaker David Lynch dive gloriously off the cliff and deep into his own endless subconscious. And a deep dive it is.

This is Lynch’s most avant guard film since “Eraserhead,” but infinitely more complex and with a sprawling multi-language cast that touches on infidelity, Hollywood, Poland, a killer hypnotist, screwdriver murders, and giant talking rabbits that live in an old urban apartment. That’s not a typo. It is a fascinating, maddening, over-long, never-boring trip that is brilliant, both horrific and hilarious, and just plain WTF strange.

Diving into the plot may be pointless, but here goes: The film opens on a Polish man and woman, faces blurred, as they enter a hotel room for sex. We then switch to a crying woman watching TV. Cue the bunnies. Then we focus on a L.A. film star (Dern) as she is visited by a neighbor (Grace Zabriskie), just before the former starts work on a film with a cad actor (Justin Theroux). From there … it’s down, or rather up, Lynch’s twisted brain stem, and onto his cinematic themes of identity, multiple bodies in one persona and the way Hollywood splatters, not realizes, dreams.

This all makes the story of “Mulholland Dr.” seem as daring as “Horton Hears a Who.” And that fact actually lends the films its surrealist Dali-on-film kinetic kick. This is art. Hands down. A Lynch regular, Dern’s multi-arc performance here is an amazing to behold, on par with Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood.” She’s in virtually every scene, and plays characters playing other people who, in fact, may be an entirely different third person.

Not all of “Inland” scores: At three hours, the film takes far too many side trips into nowhere, and the cheap film stock used by Lynch can be frustratingly blurry in darkness and blown out in bright light, rendering many scenes indecipherable. But when the credits roll, one can’t deny that they just took a singular trip. B+