Under the Silver Lake
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Riki Lindhome, Topher Grace, Grace Van Patten, Callie Hernandez
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Under the Silver Lake is impossible to talk about without acknowledging A24’s strange delay of its theatrical release and subsequent anxieties about having a theatrical release at all. Last I checked, and admittedly I haven’t followed it super closely, the movie was going to experience a very limited theatrical release and a wide release on VOD. And when I saw the movie’s first trailer, it was before watching La La Land in the Cineramadome, promising a release in a few months.
The mystery of why the studio sat on the film for so long- which, according to After the Credits editor Tyler Harlow, who saw a test screening, was relatively unchanged by the studio for those two years- oddly segues into the content of the movie itself. Under the Silver Lake is a puzzle box, certainly written and plotted and paced with deliberation and yet deviating from the traditional feeling of a plot as there’s no true inciting incident. The inciting incident is starting the movie. Once it’s onscreen and “Never My Love” by The Association is playing and Andrew Garfield’s doe-eyed Sam is staring sleepily through a coffee shop window graffiti’d to say “Beware the Dog Killer,” we are already deep in the maze.
The official inciting incident comes when Sam meets cute with Riley Keough’s Sarah, only to discover the next morning that she and her fans have vacated their apartment in totality. On the news, a wealthy billionaire is reported missing. A reclusive artist releases black and white comics relaying the mythos of Los Angeles’ east side, in which the movie takes place in exclusivity. Jimmy Simpson’s character, credited only as Bar Buddy, mentions at a rooftop bar party (called “Purgatory”) that there’s an ocean nearby and yet they swim on the roof. Back to the cartoonist- his comics include depictions of a dog killer, an owl woman who sneaks into people’s houses at night in the nude and murders them, and the sinister secrets of what leaks underneath Silverlake, both the town and titular lake.
The movie is an assault, with moments that feel innocuous or even listless enough, yet are all treated with the utmost dramatic tension. This is thanks in part to Disasterpiece’s excellent score, a radical departure from the electric whine of Fez and director David Robert Mitchell’s previous film, It Follows. This score is more reminiscent of Vertigo, melodramatic and baroque, a feeling of sublime horror that lurks on the edges of every scene and frame.
The characters are aggressively unlikable, but then have you been to East Hollywood and ever made small talk with a stranger at a bar? It’s like that. Everyone is both presentational and passive, ambitious and listless. The men are toxic and the women are vain. Everyone’s white. This is to gentrification what Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Blue Velvet are to the American dream. The dying dregs of modernism spiraling into a self-sustaining nightmare that no longer needs to pitch itself as rational. Billionaires build ziggurats underground, overseen by homeless monarchs.
Sam at one point complains about the homeless, saying they are like poltergeists or ghosts, always watching people having better things, but since they cannot have them, they are bullies. This describes Sam to a tee. He is a voyeur, a bully, a freeloader. He has no job and seemingly has things without paying for them. We are not supposed to like Sam; we’re not really supposed to like anyone. And I think that’s why the movie works. One of the most grating and movie-killing scenes of 2017 was the scene in A Ghost Story where a thirty-something white guy goes on a tirade about how nothing means anything. The soundtrack swells and compliments him. Sure, he’s a bit worked up, but the movie gives him far too much due. Contrast this with a similar scene in this movie where Sam indeed shares the movie’s thesis ala mansplain, but he is soaking up in juice in a bathtub after being sprayed in the face by a skunk and vomiting. The score is conspicuously absent in this moment and the only audience to the mansplain is Rikki Lindholm’s character (Actress is her name in the credits). Rikki nods, nervously.
“Oh, you think that’s weird?” Sam says.
“A little,” Lindholme replies, before excusing herself. He really does smell quite bad.
The term “subvert” has been thrown around a bit much in today’s cinema, but I think it has to do in part to the toxicity of societal discourse as a whole. When everyone is so dogmatic, everything is subversion. The movie reeks of the male gaze, but it’s so extreme that it feels like some kind of form of aversion therapy. It certainly isn’t hot. It’s like taking the smutty Hardy’s commercials of the early 2000’s and turning them into a horror aesthetic. The Hardy’s commercial isn’t mentioned, but the Burger King one where a woman appears to be fellating a sandwich is included. The cartoonist (credited as comic man), played by Patrick Fischler- whom you may recognize from Mulholland Drive’s infamous Winky’s Diner scene- alludes to this over-sexualization of media as a way of keeping people under control. The movie is They Live without the glasses or definite answers.
If you like definite answers, you’ll hate Under the Silver Lake, as every puzzle solution Sam finds unlocks more puzzles. And more definite answers are hardly satisfactory. But in a strange sort of sense, Sam does achieve every goal he sets in the movie. That spoils less than you might think. And if you like mystery, especially that haunting brand of mystery that lingers with you long after the movie is over and long after you’ve read this review, you’ll love the movie. It truly is worth mentioning in the same breath as Mulholland Drive, and shares the dreamlike tone of that movie’s first two thirds. There is something substantive about this particular movie; it feels tangibly intangible the way a slushie is both a solid and a liquid. I cannot answer why A24 sat on this movie for so long, or why they shied away from it like some sort of dirty secret, but perhaps if you were to take its press releases and translate them into hexadecimal code, you might start to see why.
B