The AV Club gave David Lynch's final film a C-minus. Time disagreed.
The Original Review
“Lynch has burrowed so far into his own head that he's lost all sense of how to communicate with an audience.”
I want you to imagine something. You've spent thirty years building a body of work that changed the way people think about film. You gave the world Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks — art that cracked open the skull of American cinema and showed people things they'd never seen before. You are David Lynch. And then you decide to push yourself even further. You take a consumer-grade DV camera, you throw away the script, you spend three years assembling something deeply personal and terrifying, and The A.V. Club's Scott Tobias tells the world you've "lost all sense of how to communicate with an audience." That sentence has lived in my head for almost twenty years now, because it reveals everything wrong with how critics think about the relationship between artist and audience. Lynch didn't lose the ability to communicate — he chose to communicate differently. Tobias couldn't hear it, and instead of sitting with that discomfort, he wrote a grade on it like he was marking a college essay.
What guts me about this review is the way it uses Lynch's own reputation as a weapon against him. The piece essentially argues that because Lynch made things the reviewer liked before, this new thing that the reviewer doesn't like represents a decline. That's not criticism. That's entitlement. It's the idea that an artist owes you more of what you already enjoyed, and if they give you something else, they've failed. Every single creator I know has felt this exact pressure — the invisible leash of audience expectation. Lynch cut that leash with Inland Empire, and Tobias punished him for it. Easy to say from the press box that an artist should stay in their lane. Try actually being in the studio at 3 AM, chasing something you can barely articulate, knowing full well that people will hate it and doing it anyway because the work demands it.
The cruelest part is what this review became in hindsight. Inland Empire was Lynch's final feature film. The man passed away in 2025 and never made another movie. That C-minus sits there in the archive as the critical establishment's parting grade to one of America's greatest filmmakers. Time has been far kinder to Inland Empire than The A.V. Club was — scholars, filmmakers, and audiences have since recognized it as one of Lynch's most ambitious and emotionally devastating works. But Tobias didn't have the patience or the humility to consider that maybe, just maybe, the problem wasn't the movie. Maybe the problem was that he expected David Lynch to make something comfortable, and David Lynch had never been in the business of comfort.
I think about all the filmmakers who read that review in 2006 and decided to play it safe on their next project. I think about the ones who had a wild, uncomfortable idea and shelved it because they saw what happened when even David Lynch tried something truly uncompromising. That's the real cost of lazy criticism — not the damage to one film's reputation, but the invisible chill it sends through every artist who reads it and thinks, why bother. Lynch bothered. He always bothered. He deserved a critic who would bother too.
