‘Inland Empire’ Restoration Trailer: David Lynch’s Surreal DV Nightmare Comes Back To Theaters In April

For a filmmaker that makes surreal, weird, nightmarish films, David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” (2006) is one of his strangest efforts. Shot without a script, Lynch handing out pages of dialogue to the actors each day, “Inland Empire” is also freakier because of its aesthetic look: it was Lynch first feature to be completely shot in digital video. And we’re talking hand-held Sony DSR-PD150 shot by Lynch himself, grainy as hell and incredibly unsettling. After the making of the film, Lynch said he would no longer shoot films on celluloid, and began feverishly proselytizing about the new medium which allowed him “more room to dream.” “Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit,” he told the New York Times in 2006, in one of the many interviews he gave to voice his new preference.

READ MORE: The Essentials: David Lynch’s Best Films

About an actress who begins to adopt the persona of her character in a film, her world becomes nightmarish and surreal, “Inland Empire” stars Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, and Julia Ormond. A newly remastered picture and soundtrack supervised by Lynch opens April 8 in New York at the IFC Center, via Janus Films with a national rollout to follow.

But curiously, some are already voicing concern about the restoration, saying that it cleans up and softens much of the freakish grain of the original. See filmmaker Will Ross’ Twitter thread below with a lot of comparative side by side about the original and the restoration. Janus is very connected to the Criterion Collection and a restoration release usually precedes a new Blu-Ray release, but one wonders if that’ll trigger some of the same response to Criterion’s Wong Kar-Wai boxset, which featured many of the auteurs films restored to his liking, but often looking quite radically different from the original release.

Regardless, here’s the official synopsis:

David Lynch’s labyrinthine Hollyweird freakout—his last feature to date—is his most uncompromising creation: a fugue-state trawl through the darkest realms of the subconscious that pushes his straight-from-the-id imagery and sinister dream logic to their extremes. When she accepts a role in a supposedly cursed production, a movie actor on the verge of a comeback (Laura Dern, in a fearless performance) finds herself tumbling down a series of increasingly disturbing rabbit holes (complete with literal rabbits) that lead her from the glittering heights of Tinseltown to the depths of human depravity. In his first feature shot on digital video, Lynch makes visionary use of the medium’s smudged textures and murky chiaroscuro to enhance the hallucinatory, nightmarish quality of what may be his magnum opus.

Lynch might be going the same route as Wong Kar-Wai, which is essentially: this is my film and I’ve changed my mind on the way I want it to look now. That’s heresy and revisionism to some, but maybe it’s just an evolution of the art. Regardless, “Inland Empire” is a nightmarish classic of Lynch’s terrifying dream cinema and if you’ve never seen it, you should definitely use this restoration release as a way to correct that. Watch the new trailer below and while you’re at it, take a second to appreciate the way Oscar-campaigned for Laura Dern with a cow on the streets of Los Angeles (see below).