JEAN Luc Godard once said all you need is a girl and a gun and you've got yourself a movie - enough of a plot to hook an audience. Inland Empire, the new film from the American director and wizard of the weird, David Lynch, has both. It even has a screwdriver, and a scene in which Laura Dern's character, an actress called Nikki Grace, watches her doppleganger across the street on a Hollywood boulevard. But it cannot be said to have a plot.

Yet Inland Empire does an improbable thing and it does it for a mesmerising three hours - it spine-tingles and enthrals (without the firing of the gun, incidentally, although the screwdriver is put to unexpected use). Like his other mind-mangling films Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, it is a rabbit hole of parallel universes, an inscrutable, Mobious strip of space and time in which Nikki's identity becomes melded with the actress she is portraying.

It transports you to a dark place where the feeling is like waking up inside someone else's nightmare.

Ordinary moments (if such a thing can be said to exist in Lynchworld) crackle with the electrical charge of dread. It is steeped in anxiety. It is easily David Lynch's most obscure film - and that's saying something. But it is a masterpiece, a scintillating, cinematic experience that defies rational explanation - a wild ride around the arcane corners of a TVobsessed collective unconscious.

The film opens in a hotel room.

A man is talking with a prostitute, but their upper bodies are blurred out. Later, a crying woman watches a TV show in which three bunnies speak cryptically followed by canned laughter. Then we meet Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), an actress who lives in a large, expensive home with a sinister husband who keeps a wary eye on her. She is visited by a bug-eyed new Slavic neighbour (Grace Zabriskie) who predicts she will get the part in a new film 'On High In Blue Tomorrow'. But she warns her of a Polish gypsy curse that hangs over the film which will end in murder.

Morphing identities is a staple of Lynch's films, and the film burrows like a twisting nightmare into the mindscape of Nikki and her screen character Susan. Their identities merge, and Nikki has an affair with her co-star, the Charlie Sheen-like Devon Berk (Justin Theroux). But that's only the beginning.

What Inland Empire is really about is anyone's guess - David Lynch is suitably cryptic. But it seems fuelled with unease about sexuality - Nikki's unconscious is populated by young hookers who laugh at her like mocking sirens.

Is this in part a study of the deeper fears of an actress on the verge of middle-age - in this case Lynch's muse Laura Dern? The film mirrors too the changing nature of entertainment - the usurping of glossy Hollywood films by cheaply filmed television (the film production itself mirrors this, filmed on cheap, nasty digital cameras). The canned laughter of the austere sitcom bunnies mocks packaged television; the many strands of the film channel-flip as if at the mercy of a remote control-obsessed watcher.

Inland Empire is an empire of the unconscious. With it, Lynch confirms he is a bona fide poet of the cinema. He has unshackled himself from conventional film grammar; instead he wheels and deals in cinematic free verse - a freeflow association of ideas that strangely makes sense.

It ends with an explosion of music and dance and it seems apposite: like great music that shakes the soul, Lynch's films are the product of thinking that is untrammeled and unconscious.

One does not have to explain the workings of great music to enjoy its effect. The same can be said here. Lynch stirs up cinematic form with the hand of a master.

Whether you enjoy it or not is a matter of taste.