Under the Silver Lake

A hallucinatory neo-noir that pokes fun at audiences who revel in solving unsolvable movie puzzles, conspiracy theories and the internet generation's unhealthy obsession with pop culture. How much you enjoy it or get bored with it depends on how much you accept its absurd logic. It's reminiscent of the logic of the old adventure video games from the 80s and 90s, in which you as the player explored different locations collecting various items and had to figure out how to combine them to progress further. The way you combined them was often illogical, which drove you insane with an obsessive urge to constantly combine everything with everything (“is this old magazine a regular magazine, or can it be used for something important?”). But you didn't rest until you found out, for example, that if you scratched the James Dean statue, the King of the Homeless would appear and lead you to a mysterious underground. So does the protagonist of Under the Silver Lake, whose search for a missing neighbor leads him to unravel a pop culture super-conspiracy behind the curtain of picturesque Los Angeles. After he starts discovering coded clues all around him (in commercials, songs, and movies), he can't help feeling that everything is connected. David Robert Mitchell, the director, deliberately frustrates his audience with the aforementioned absurd logic, but manages to reward them with an immersive atmosphere and an entertaining play on audience expectations and genre conventions. (16/09/2019)

Delightful. For many it will understandably be a hard to swallow trip through a town that for the film has the same meaning Bethlehem has for Christians. Mitchell leads the attention unpretentiously, the viewer must focus on the details and the small pop-cultural references to fully enjoy the raggedness and self-reflection of a unique world, where every corner offers something different – always a vague clue, both for the viewer, who’s pushed to several interpretations, and for the protagonist who guides them in that world. The ending is not as dramaturgically solid as the best of Lynch and the runtime feels a bit excessive, but the consistent pace and the coherent author’s signature put the thumbs very well up in the final appraisal. It’s the first film where I didn’t mind Garfield, and if he keeps on choosing interesting projects that offer cinephiles food for thought like this, I might end up liking him. And that applies twofold for Mitchell. 80% (12/01/2019)

Considering I once coughed up a script about something similar, it's safe to say that the film should speak my language, except that's exactly the aspect where Mitchell and I are terribly at odds. Mainly in the way the film constantly tries to create that surreal atmosphere of meta-time, but permanently undermines it with constant specific pastiches and quotes that go to such extremes as to use painted canvases as backgrounds. And yet he still couldn't get his way and shoot on film, so we're watching self-conscious references to noir practices in ugly and unforgiving digital, where the paltry budget (8 and a half million) stands out several times worse. In a world populated with Inherent Vice, Brick, or David Lynch, Under the Silver Lake is not worth considering at all. (13/03/2019)

Under the Silver Lake consist of lengthy wanderings around LA, people meeting and experiencing bizarre things, between which there are unfortunately no interesting connections that would move the plot forward. It has a fine, noir-like atmosphere with references to Hitchcock and Lynch. Not to mention the sexy girls, especially the main femme fatale, for which Garfield falls head over heels. The script, however, does not work as it should, being nothing more than a pseudo-intellectual fusion of neo-noir with pop-culture ornaments and, above all, a weak "point" which the viewer had vainly hoped would save the whole movie. That said, the film at least has a nice (pop-culture) music score. [Cannes] (17/05/2018)

Comparing the atmosphere of this film with David Lynch is a bit off the mark. The movie is actually not as strange as it looks at first glance. It’s rather a wannabe thriller with noir elements where people behave in strange ways mainly because they are simply weird. Andrew Garfield plays probably the weirdest role in his entire career and it would probably be better if he didn’t have it in his portfolio. For over two hours, something is going on that portrays the human vanity in Hollywood and it does so in such an inconspicuous manner that I don’t think the locals will understand that the movie is referring to them. The entire time, I was waiting for something a bit more meaningful to come out of it, but the good-for-nothing ending cut that off and essentially confirmed what this movie is about. It’s actually about nothing at all. (29/01/2019)