Justin Theroux, Laura Dern, and David Lynch at the 2006 New York Film Festival press conference for Inland Empire. View more pictures from the press conference.

As it stands now, Dern is commanding as Nikki Grace, a veteran actress who has signed on with womanizing costar Devin (Justin Theroux) for the adulterous weepie On High in Blue Tomorrows, a cursed remake of a project that was abandoned after its two leads were murdered. Inevitably, on-screen chemistry lusts its way off-screen, even after Nikki's towering husband warns Devon that there will be "dark, inescapable consequences" if the vows of marriage are forsaken. So far so good, but then Sue, Nikki's character from the film-within-this-film, becomes her own distinct personality, then splinters into a third role for Dern. A posse of prostitutes coexist on Hollywood Blvd. and a sepia-toned Poland, reality overlaps hallucinations making temporal shifts, and how is that crying woman in the hotel room watching the same movie we are?

Every director with longevity eventually makes their film about filmmaking, and while Inland Empire ostensibly appears to be the ugly stepsister to his Tinseltown noir-subverting Mulholland Dr., Lynch is working in a cognitively corrupt, impossible genre, so the comparison is only and deliberately self-referential. Watch for slightly modified allusions to past characters (Diane Ladd's caustic TV host echoes her clash with real-life daughter Dern in Wild at Heart; Mulholland Dr.'s Laura Harring briefly shows in a staggering end-credits sequence that feels like his oeuvre's own after-party) and moments (Harry Dean Stanton's random dog speech positions him as the surrogate Jack Nance of Wild at Heart; a bug-eyed Grace Zabriskie makes idle threats about being here and there simultaneously like Lost Highway's Robert Blake). And see the sitcom family of bunny-head people? That's recycled footage from Rabbits, a series of shorts available on the official DavidLynch.com around 2002.

Laura Dern in Inland Empire

Lynch assigns himself to the disembodied voice of Bucky Jay, an ineffectual gaffer on the Blue Tomorrows set that illustrates his meta-role as a small cog in the monstrous energy of movie-making. Later, when Nikki's sinister spouse goes looking for a nameless man in the woods, he's told by a mutual friend that he left, "muttering something about Inland Empire," and complaining that the husband hasn't done enough. Considering the fact that the hubby disappears until this bit, passively avoiding the menace he promised upon Devon in the first reel, is the mystery man a reference to Lynch abandoning his own film, or worse, that the film itself has taken over his directorial duties? After two screenings, this is frankly not enough word space to fully deduce its auto-cannibalizing spirit and neverending doppleganger logic, but I implore courageous art-lovers to seek out this defiantly unique hellion when Lynch self-distributes in upcoming months. Inland Empire is interchangably terrifying, maddening, shockingly hilarious and perversely exciting, and that's just to those who end up disliking it.