The release of David Lynch‘s remastered surrealistic and famously polarizing 2006 film Inland Empire will expand to 50 cities nationwide this month. The Janus film restoration was overseen by Lynch himself and has been fully converted into 4K resolution.
Although Lynch has directed short films and television in the 16 years since its release, Inland Empire was the director’s last studio film. The movie, which followed Lynch’s previous opus, the critically -beloved Mullholland Drive by a comparatively-brief five years, was met with conflicting reviews by critics and fans alike. While its stars — Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, and Justin Theroux — were praised for their performances, many viewers found the film’s surreal and experimental structure too dense for consumption, while others considered it to be brilliant and groundbreaking.
The film was named second best of 2006 by the famed French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, while The Guardian named it one of the ten most underrated films of the decade in 2009. In recent years many have re-examined the movie as one of Lynch’s best.
Whether or not the lack of instant acclaim caused Lynch to go on hiatus from feature filmmaking is unknown; the famously pat director has rarely said much about the film’s wildly enigmatic plot, telling the Riverside Press-Enterprise in 2006 that it’s “about a woman in trouble, and it’s a mystery, and that’s all I want to say about it.”
However, Lynch does seem proud of the remaster — for a given value of “proud” — and even seems excited for people to either revisit it or to see the film for the first time. “I appreciate you having an interest in it,” Lynch told Indiewire. “Now that it’s being re-released it has a new life, a chance.”
