'The Inland Empire'

At one point during the 172 minutes I sat watching David Lynch's bizarre, unsettling new film “Inland Empire,” I inevitably had to liberate from my bladder the large bottle of water I'd consumed earlier.

It's moments like these that suggest the true worth of a film. Do you sprint to the restroom and miss a snippet of brilliance? Or do you drag your feet, glad for a hiatus from the hallucination of light and sound?

I traveled at a steady clip. “Inland Empire,” shot on digital camera, is certainly a hallucination (you could call it an extremely bad trip), yet the vision is so seamlessly strange that it had me in its grip until the end.

Welcome to Lynchland. Like most of the director's films, this one has morphing personalities, disorienting non-sequiturs and a time-space continuum that's been squashed and spread to the corners of the universe.

An actress named Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) lands a role in a romantic melodrama before learning it's a remake of a film left unfinished because the two leads were murdered.

An early scene makes clear that murder could be in the cards for Grace as well.

But who'll do it? A family of rabbit-headed humanoids? The scraggly Pole who lurks behind trees? I thought it could've been the roomful of bantering prostitutes until they started dancing to “The Loco-motion.”

My hurried trip to the restroom revealed the extent to which the moviealmost pure menace, was messing with my head. What were those strange sounds coming from the next stall? And what sort of evil plan was that little girl hatching in the hallway?

Rating: Three out of four rabbit heads.

'First Snow'

Affter the eerie manipulations of “Inland Empire,” I was ready to leaven my cinematic psyche with a bit of fluff.

Alas, it's difficult to forgo relentless dread once you've strapped yourself in. So I surrendered to “First Snow” — a film directed by Mark Fergus, co-writer of the beautifully bleak “Children of Men” — and its promise of existential agony.

Like Lynch's film, “First Snow” pits its main character, Jimmy Starks, against a nameless, impending doom. Stranded at a desert rest stop, the insouciant Starks gets his palm read by a fortuneteller who deigns he'll be dead by first snow.

Can man alter fate? Cue existential agony.

This film, however, illustrates the pitfalls of exploring metaphysical concepts on celluloid. Whereas “Inland Empire” becomes a juggernaut of dread when it dissolves the boundaries of linear storytelling, “First Snow” is undone by its allegiance to telling a straight story. Or rather, Fergus tells a straight story and then bails out improbably at the end.

Once Starks realizes his fortune likely is accurate, he falls into an alarmed tailspin. What'll do him in? Those cigarettes he can't stop smoking? An angry ex-con? Or will it be a lazy heart valve?

Some might praise the film's open-ended conclusion, in which Starks' fate is left uncertain. But when a filmmaker spends 100 minutes weaving a tale of suspense, it's disappointing when the final 60 seconds turn ambiguous on you.

Rating: One and a half out of four lazy heart valves.

Brian Chasnoff | 210SA contributor