How to Survive: Inland Empire (2006)

How to Survive is now on Patreon! Support us at Patreon.com/HowtoSurvivePod to get every episode one week early, plus monthly bonus episodes and more.   It's episode 272...and I don't like this kind of talk; the things you're saying.   Where exactly do you start with Inland Empire (2006)?   Ostensibly the story of Nikki, an actor cast in a remake of a supposedly cursed film in which the actors were murdered, what follows is a three hour psychological horror tone poem in which fiction and reality repeatedly collide, break down and are rebuilt. Lynch runs the gamut of everything from surreal rabbit sitcoms to surreal Polish neo-realism, with Laura Dern clinging on for dear life at the centre of his artistic hurricane. It might just be a work of genius.   July's David Lynch season concludes with a borderline incomprehensible piece of arthouse cinema as we ask ourselves a series of unanswerable questions: What does it all mean? Is this the ugliest-looking film we've ever watched? How do you survive a painting? Plus, crowbarred comparisons to safer ground as we variously compare it to Mission Impossible and Stewart Lee, and a piece of genuinely scholarly film studies work from one of our patrons.   All of which leads to one question: How would you survive?   Whatever happens, one thing's for sure: This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it's tomorrow.   Next time out it's Cosmic Horror season, kicking off with John Carpenter's In The Mouth Of Madness (1994).