My ill-advised endeavor to watch the top 200 horror movies of all time, plus 100 additions, in order to determine a definitive (read: completely subjective) Top 100 continues.

Like a whole night’s worth of indigestion dreams, Lynch’s 3-hour dive into the creator’s psyche is long on symbolism and short on sense. If you’re unfamiliar with the acclaimed director’s oeuvre and his focus on the Jungian well where all of our ideas live, a well into which Lynch regularly reaches for his own ideas, then this film is going to largely be an exercise in banging your head against a wall and hoping the resulting concussion will open your eyes to some truth hidden in its cryptic dialogue and uncanny sets. If you are a Lynch devotee, however, you might see the culmination of a life’s work, a creator’s final reach into the well, only to find it’s been infiltrated by an evil entity and what the creator plucks out is not Beauty but Nightmare.

Inland Empire stars Laura Dern as Nikki (or Susan, depending on which angle you’re viewing from) an actress who has just been chosen for the lead role in a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows, a southern melodrama, but Nikki soon learns that the film’s script was based on some mysterious bit of Polish folklore, and an adaptation was attempted once before. The director tells her that the previous production was shut down under strange circumstances involving the possible murder of its two leads. As the world of the film and the world of reality collide and intertwine in ways that Nikki can’t comprehend, she is sent spiraling down a disjointed rabbit hole, a story told in hyperlink, out of context and out of time. All shot on a handheld Sony, a contrivance that lends the nightmare a voyeuristic quality, a sense that what you’re seeing is not a film but the raw experience of creation.

Inland Empire is a psychological thriller. Inland Empire has dance sequences. Inland Empire has a surrealist sitcom starring a family of rabbits. There’s a monkey and a lumberjack and an entity called the Phantom who stalks the backlots of creativity.

Inland Empire cannot be described; it must either be experienced or avoided. Those are your choices.

Inland Empire is, in short and how I came very close to writing as my whole review, fucking inscrutable.