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Inland Empire
Plot Synopsis by Jason Buchanan

Cinema of the surreal icon David Lynch follows up the success of his critically acclaimed 2001 feature Mulholland Drive with this dark mystery, shot on a handheld Sony PD150 digital video recorder. It is the tale of an actress whose personality becomes increasingly fragmented as she delves ever deeper into her work for a high-profile filmmaker. Kingsley (Jeremy Irons) is a director looking to adapt for the screen a Polish gypsy folktale that was previously stalled when the two leads were viciously murdered. Having offered the female lead to devoted actress Nikki (Laura Dern), Kingsley warns her male co-star, Devon (Justin Theroux), to maintain his professional distance, as Nikki's husband (Peter J. Lucas) is known to be notoriously possessive. As the passionate co-stars quickly cross the line and become lovers, Nikki's slowly slipping sense of reality causes her to eventually become lost in her character while the mysterious story of a Polish couple unfurls, and a trio of giant stage-bound rabbits (voices of Naomi Watts, Scott Coffey, and Laura Harring) lounge around on the sofa and tend to their domestic duties. Shot over the course of two and a half years and without a formalized script, Lynch's hallucinogenic look at a doomed film project features all of the abstract imagery and strange symbolism that have long made the director a favorite of film fans who embrace his disorienting approach to unconventional storytelling.

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Similar Works
Hotel  (2001, Mike Figgis)
Drawing Restraint 9  (2005, Matthew Barney)
Happy Here and Now  (2002, Michael Almereyda)
The Fall  (2006, Tarsem Singh)
The Wayward Cloud  (2005, Tsai Ming-Liang)
Synecdoche, New York  (2008, Charlie Kaufman)
Ararat  (2002, Atom Egoyan)
Slipstream  (2007, Anthony Hopkins)
Other Related Works
 Is related to:    Mulholland Dr.  (2001, David Lynch)
   Lynch  (2007, blackANDwhite)
   Rabbits [Web Series]  (2002, David Lynch)
 Is influenced by:    Meshes of the Afternoon  (1943, Maya Deren)
   That Obscure Object of Desire  (1977, Luis Buñuel)