On the off-chance you don’t know what this is, Under The Silver Lake is the highly anticipated film from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, hot off the acclaim he received from his last film, It Follows. While it may have gained some early hype, it eventually slipped under a lot of people’s radar after its distributor – for some reason – decided to delay the film from its original release date of June 28th of 2018, and doing it over and over until it finally got a bare minimum release in a few theaters a couple weeks ago before getting unceremoniously dumped on VOD the week after.
And now, having finally seen the film, it’s easy to understand why A24 might have struggled to market this (though, I don’t see how it’s any more difficult than some of their equally weirder movies). It’s the kind of wildly ambitious and relentlessly weird effort that can only come from an artist given free reign to tap into all their strange creative impulses without the need to impress anyone.
The basic premise is that it’s about an aimless young man names Sam (Andrew Garfield), who lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, and has a strange interest in conspiracy theories and hidden messages in pop culture. However, he meets a woman in his neighborhood, Sarah (Riley Keough), who he is immediately smitten with. The problem is, she disappears the very next day. This sets Sam off on a surreal odyssey through Los Angeles to track her down, which inadvertently leads him to discover things he never could’ve imagined.
The film very much owes a debt to the sort of idiosyncratic neo-noirs such as Mulholland Drive, Inherent Vice, and The Big Lebowski, but in its ambition, it can often veer into territory similar to Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. It’s an aggressive and purposefully off-putting experience meant to throw you for a loop for the entirety of its admirably egregious two hour and nineteen minute runtime. It’s the kind of film that begs for repeat viewings so you can catch the hidden messages, weird details, and background clues you might have missed the first time around.
It’s no wonder the response to this movie has been so divisive since it premiered at Cannes last year. It’s totally a double edged sword that Mitchell is dealing with. Lean one way, and you get a hackneyed mystery that plays too obvious given its influences, lean another direction, and the story becomes so complicated and alienating that the audience is too distracted and loses touch with the character they’re meant to follow.
Now, while fully acknowledging that personal taste will be a huge factor in each individual reaction tpo this, I found that Mitchell was able to make this work. It’s clear he’s having a blast here, as well as Garfield, who delivers one of my favorite performances of his here. However, it’s ultimately the filmmaking that turns this into a truly compelling experience. Mitchell is working once again with previous collaborators, cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, editor, Julio Perez IV, and composer, Disasterpiece, and they’re all able to sync with Mitchell’s strange vision of Los Angeles with adventurous camera work, a lush score, and a offbeat rhythm that carries the film from scene to scene.
The film is often funny, unnerving, baffling, and occasionally a mix of all three. This was more than enough to keep me engaged. Sam as a character is one that under less delicate hands would’ve been insufferable as a lead, but the film seems to take pleasure to put him through hell and call him out on his own problems. It’s really fun to see him bounce from one colorful character to another, and soon enough you find yourself getting sucked into his warped, conspiracy obsessed worldview, which the film plays with beautifully.
As if it wasn’t already clear, Under The Silver Lake is not going to be for everybody, but it is the kind of film that will undoubtedly gain a devoted audience overtime, and they’ll take immense pleasure in digging into all the hidden details and theories that David Robert Mitchell has thrown in here. But if you don’t want to engage with the film in that way, it’s still a gorgeous production that keeps you on your toes, not knowing if you’re about to encounter something amusing or horrifying. Andrew Garfield performs with an awkward, lanky physicality that impressed me quite a bit. As someone who is always gung-ho for artists taking big swings, I really enjoyed this.