Late
into Under the Silver Lake, the
long-awaited return of writer-director David Robert Mitchell after his 2014
indie-horror smash hit It Follows,
paranoid conspiracy theorist Sam (Andrew Garfield) remarks upon a recent
discovery in the film’s labyrinthine timeline ‘what the f**k am I supposed to
do with this?’. Evidently, after it’s
polarizing 2018 Cannes Film Festival premiere, production company and
distributor A24 asked themselves the same question and pushed the film’s
release date back nearly a year before giving it a miniscule theatrical release
followed by dumping it on-demand three days later.
Given
the pedigree of it’s writer-director and the high-profile cast involved,
everyone began wondering whether or not Mitchell unleashed a misunderstood
masterpiece or meandering masturbatory tripe.
Having finally sat through the film’s ponderous, near two-and-a-half
hour running time down one endless rabbit hole after another, I regret to
inform Mr. Robert Mitchell may have disappeared far up his own ass.
Set
in Los Angeles sometime in 2011, Under
the Silver Lake finds directionless loser Sam on the verge of being evicted
from his apartment, but that doesn’t stop him from casual sexual encounters
with numerous women before setting his sights on his beautiful new neighbor
Sarah (Riley Keough). After bonding over
weed and kisses, Sam goes home only to find Sarah and her roommates have mysteriously
vanished without a trace, setting in motion a breadcrumb trail of homegrown
sleuthing loaded with increasingly bizarre red herrings and coded messages
connected to everything and nothing.
Reuniting with cinematographer Michael Gioulakis and electronic musician
Disasterpeace with a score which sounds like a frank imitation of Angelo
Badalamenti’s neo-noir soundtrack for David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Mitchell tosses in everything but the kitchen sink
when he isn’t loudly wearing his influences on his sleeves. Despite
the film’s strong central lead and the technical brilliance on full display in
every carefully crafted panoramic widescreen vista, Under the Silver Lake tragically meanders from one confounding
scenario to the next.
Touching on
bizarre threads which go nowhere involving a dog killer, an otherworldly naked
woman in an owl mask, an elderly man claiming to have written every song and
piece of music under the sun and a religious cult buried deep underground,
somehow it all something to do with a magazine bearing the film’s title, a cereal
box, The Legend of Zelda and Kurt
Cobain’s Fender Mustang. If this sounds
like the absurdist cockamamie of writer-director Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales filtered through the stoned
prism of Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, you’re probably giving Under the Silver Lake too much credit.
In
a recent Vulture interview, David Robert Mitchell describes the film as ‘a
mystery and there are mysteries inside of that mystery, and some of the
characters could be considered mysteries themselves. Will I explain any of them? No.’ Further
still, the film’s endless myriad of impenetrable coded messages no doubt
inspired a sub-Reddit cult attempting to decrypt the film’s meaning, much to Mitchell’s
delight who remarked ‘its nice to hear people are seeing some of the layers’.
Whether you come away feeling enthralled by
the unfolding of unresolved riddles and ambiguities or close your hand on thin
air, one thing is for sure, Under the Silver
Lake is utterly in love with itself and is the work of a still-gifted
auteur who began to believe his own press clippings with even greater fervor
than the film’s hero. I’m of the belief
the mind behind The Myth of the American
Sleepover and It Follows can and
will make another cinematic field goal but I would be lying if I said he didn’t
fumble the ball hard this time around.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki