Under the Silver Lake

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)

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)

This neo-noir mashup will most probably anger even more people than The Image Book (because more moviegoers will go to the cinema to see it because of Garfield). Rather than creating something original, both films are based on recontextualising earlier media content and seeking hidden meanings in pop culture, which represents the basic frame of reference in Under the Silver Lake. Everything refers to something that someone else invented in the past. There are no originals, only copies and rewrites. Therefore, the story has to be set in Los Angeles, a city that has played a role in so many films that it has become a remake of itself. Mitchell’s third film holds together thanks to its absorbing atmosphere at the boundary between Vertigo and Chinatown and its pseudo-detective plot. It unfolds in such absurd, totally Lynchian mindfuck ways that instead of providing satisfaction from the uncovering of new contexts, it brings only gradually deepened frustration. Both for us and for the main protagonist, a paranoid slacker like from a nineties indie film, it almost involves two and a half hours of a delayed climax (the only satisfying interaction takes place during the prologue). Throughout its runtime, it is also immensely entertaining, while being a deferential and cunning pastiche of classic and post-classic noir films (and the music from such films), most of whose “shortcomings” can be interpreted as conscious and ironic work with certain conventions and stereotypes. For example, we can understand the reduction of the female characters to more or less passive objects as a critique of the “male gaze”, as that is precisely how the mentally immature protagonist, whose perspective the film thoroughly adheres to throughout, perceives women based on their media representation in films by Hitchcock and others. Under the Silver Lake is an ambivalent postmodern work which, thanks to its lack of a centre and its solid structure, succeeds in expressing the confusion of young people who try in vain to find some sort of higher meaning in all of the stories obscuring their view of reality. For me, it was one of the most entertaining movies of the year, but there is roughly equal probability that you will hate it with all your heart. 85% (03/12/2018)

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)

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)