Heard in the elevator after a screening of Inland Empire, David Lynch's outrageously free-associative three-hour opus: "Um, how does he know when it's over?"

I'm sure I don't know. I'm still chewing on Eraserhead.

What I do know is that the famously oblique nightmare Eraserhead is practically a light, warmup exercise for Inland Empire.

The latter is presented with such surehanded courage of its dark, unfathomable convictions, it's as if more linear work like The Elephant Man never happened.

What I also know is that the various shades of "dumbfounded" on the faces of characters probably mirror the audience members' expressions at any given time, and Laura Dern (who keeps morphing into other characters a la Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) speaks for many of us when she says "I can't tell if it's yesterday or tomorrow, and it's a real mindf---."

And yet, what can you say about a movie that keeps returning to a motif of a sitcom populated by rabbits who speak in Pinteresque non sequiturs (to uproarious studio audience laughter)?

Or breaks into amateur-night song-and-dance numbers involving prostitutes?

Or has a character "die" of a knife wound on a Hollywood sidewalk in front of a Japanese crack whore who, apropos of nothing, tells a story about her best friend's monkey?

Your left brain wants you to hit this movie with a stick and yell "Make sense!"

But your right side just might eat it up like that dream you once had about being trapped inside a giant roast turkey and gobbling your way out.

Insofar as Inland Empire has a plot, it involves an actress named Nikki Grace (Dern) who is nervously lolling about her improbably stuffy Edwardian mansion waiting to hear whether she landed a part in a movie called On High In Blue Tomorrows by "important" director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons).

The whole thing takes place in a Hollywood that seems a product of a space-time rift, where, for example, a '40s Hedda Hopper-esque tinseltown gossip hosts a contemporary Entertainment Tonight type magazine show.

The good news is presaged by a visit from a weird old woman (Grace Zabriskie), who tells her she will get the role and there will be ... murder!

Normality goes off the rails soon after Nikki gets the role and Kingsley and his assistant Freddie (hilariously played by Harry Dean Stanton), explain that Blue Tomorrows is actually a remake of a drama that was never completed, because the leading lady and her male co-star were killed by her jealous husband (amid the interaction of a bunch of shady Polish gangsters).

Of course, Nikki's identity and that of Susan, the original actor, begin to blur together, along with that of Nikki's character, a coarse trailer-park type who says things like, "Bam! I kicked him straight in the balls so hard, they go crawling into his brain for refuge. He went down like a two-dollar whore."

I may be overreaching even trying to compartmentalize that much of Inland Empire.

The Polish part is substantial (a good portion of the dialogue is subtitled Polish).

There's a Gypsy circus. Images of sex, death and claustrophobic camerawork create an inchoate mood of horror.

What does it all mean?

What do you think you're reading, Cahiers du Cinema?

Suffice to say that three hours of hallucinatory audacity passes a lot faster than you might expect.

(This film is rated 14-A)
More Movie Reviews