Under the Silver Lake-Review

"Sam, intelligent but without purpose, finds a mysterious woman swimming in his apartment's pool one night. The next morning, she disappears. Sam sets off across LA to find her, and along the way he uncovers a conspiracy far more bizarre."

Written & Directed by: David Robert Mitchell

Starring: Andrew Garfield 

                 Riley Keough

                 Topher Grace 

                 Riki Lindhome 

                 Grace Van Patten 

Nintendo Power magazine, codes in song lyrics, secret maps hidden in cereal boxes and a mysterious young woman. What does it all mean? Well, that's for Andrew Garfield's Sam to decipher as he stumbles down a seemingly endless LA rabbit hole searching for answers. David Robert Mitchell follows up his largely popular cult horror hit It Follows with a film that seems destined to hit those same cult highs, but maybe not as quickly as the former did. 

If you took famous gumshoe Philip Marlowe, turned him into a greasy, reddit-obsessed weirdo as written by Thomas Pynchon and directed by David Lynch, you might have an idea of how wild Under the Silver Lake is. Nothing really makes sense until it does and even then you're left wondering "wait, that's it?" The pieces are so gangly and unwieldy (much like Garfield's Sam) that it becomes a whirlwind trying to keep up with it. You'll find yourself asking "so she knows him and he knows her but wait why's there a pirate in that limousine and why is there a secret club within the secret club and what does this dog murderer have to do with anything?" It's, well, a lot.

And what makes it all the more bizarre is that I don't see how this won't end up on my favorites list by the end of the year. I live for bizarre, lulling stories that take you a million places and nowhere at once. Does Sam really learn anything? Is his infatuation with a woman he just met kinda weird? Is this a movie about an incel? Yes? No? Who cares! Much like the maligned sophomore effort from Donnie Darko's Richard Kelly, Southland Tales, this is an ambitious undertaking that might not be as clever as it thinks it is. Or maybe I'm not as clever as I think I am. If it sounds like I'm rambling, it's because this is a rambling two hour and twenty minute odyssey that I'll be rolling around my brain for years. And I love it for that.

Andrew Garfield gives what's without a doubt his best performance yet. His choices are never safe and there's something adversely alluring about him.  Sam is the kind of protagonist that could only be relatable at this moment in time. He's pretty awkward, a little skeevy and obsessed with anything that's the antithesis of important.He's pretty disgusting throughout the film and people frequently tell him he smells but you can 100% see why some women are drawn to him. Which makes it all the more frustrating that he's so fixated on the woman he met just once. He's the embodiment of a generation summed up aptly by Topher Grace in the film, "men obsessed with video games, secret codes and space aliens." He's like if the deep recesses of reddit came to life, slightly alluring but more than a little repulsive.

Mitchell is clearly trying to satirize the kind of man who's stuck in arrested development and will drop everything at the first sign a woman likes him. Sam is the ultimate nice guy. A woman is nice to him once and he ends going to the ends of the Earth (or in this case from Silver Lake to Mt. Hollywood) to find her when she ghosts him. What frustrates me is that the satirization never really takes off and Mitchell almost seems to become as infatuated with his lead as his lead is with the girl. It also doesn't help that Mitchell almost immediately falls prey to the beyond-exhausted trope of using women as props. If it bit into Sam or the propensity of detective stories to demean and debase women with any sort of venom, this could have been a great satire of our time. Disappointingly, Mitchell never gets angry enough to say what probably should be said.

But again, there's the caveat: Under the Silver Lake is almost above reproach because of how satisfyingly delirious it is. Every time I found myself wanting it to say more, it plunged me further into the dark and twisted underbelly of LA. It's a pretty fantastic charm offensive. "Are you bored? Ok well here's another weird aside. Did you notice I kind of fell into the tropes I was making fun of? Look! It's the King of the Homeless!" It was impossible for me to ever roll my eyes because I'd quite literally never seen anything like the path this takes.

That leaves me the question that usually has a straightforward answer, "Is it good?" and that's where I'm struggling. In the traditional narrative sense, probably not. The payoff seems off in a way that doesn't feel like Sam really accomplished anything. But the journey is where the film really hums and why it's going to go down as one of my favorites of the year. It's a like a waking dream that meanders along at its own pace, and why I think it'll be a cult classic in years to come. It's the type of film someone will discover 20-30 years from now and it will floor them.

"Wait. This is what men were like in the 2010s?!"

And when we look back we'll probably find that disappointing answer is yes. 

VERDICT*

9/10

*Objectively it's like a 6