A Boy in Trouble

There is nothing clever, euphemistic, or hyperbolic about this admission: I have never been so scared in any movie as I was during the last half-hour or so of INLAND EMPIRE. The rough, scraping atmosphere of dread that permeates the whole film—alleviated but also somehow intensified by the elusive plot and the surreal cutaways to talking rabbits and Locomotion enthusiasts—culminates in a devastating thirty minutes, comprising a terrible death unfolding against an absurd, indifferent conversation between two strangers, and then a vaporizing of the reality/illusion boundary even as the movie purports to reinstate it, and then a preeminently Lynchian prowl around dirty corners in underlit hallways, at the end of which Laura Dern's "character" has a horrific encounter with a grotesque distortion of herself. I was just terrified, by the ambience and psychic logic of these scenes even more than by the action they depicted. Then I walked for ten minutes in the semi-dark, boarded a city bus, and cried most of the way home with my eyes wide open. INLAND EMPIRE made me insane, and intensely bereft. I'm barely more coherent or less bereft as I write this.

I'll have much to say about INLAND EMPIRE in the coming days, weeks, months, but to begin with the most frivolous and inconsequential frame of reference, I sure am glad I waited: the Best of 2006 feature will require some serious reshuffling to accommodate this film. Meanwhile, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu suddenly has a potent rival for its previously uncontested claim as the best movie of the year. A dying man and a woman dismantled now emerge as the king and queen of a morbid, frustrating, but finally surprising year at the movies. Stay tuned...