No one can do obscure, indefinable menace and foreboding quite like David Lynch, and this archetypal three-hour trip is full of powerful, eerie ominousness. Lynch can give you the willies with a still camera in an empty room. His dark colour schemes and even his lamps exude malevolence and while his films touch on the real world, they spend most of their time in Lynch's own genre - a sort of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that leaps through time and space, but has echoes that recur through its twisted narrative (and frequently through the director's 30-year career).

Laura Dern, once the ingenue in Lynch's Blue Velvet, is the lead actor in this film, and the film within it. It's a great, fractured performance: no wonder the director lobbied for an Oscar nomination for her, camping out on Hollywood Boulevard with a cow to do so (it's on YouTube). Inland Empire has big close-ups, static camera positions, a sitcom with giant rabbits and hookers on Hollywood and Vine. Little Eva's Loco-motion is the compulsory piece of innocent 60s pop - a lovely moment - and of course, much of the soundtrack is that worrying background drone with the odd hint of Eraserhead-style industrial machinery, in this case by Krzysztof Penderecki.

The plot? You wouldn't want to be Lynch's synopsis writer, but even if you're not sure what you've sat through, you'll know you've had an experience. Extras include the director's Guardian interview with Mark Kermode. He doesn't, of course, explain the film, but does give a passionate advocacy of transcendental meditation, it's "pure vibrant consciousness and any human being can dive within," he enthuses and this seems to be the key to Lynchworld. If you've got the nerve, dive into Inland Empire and see if your consciousness changes.