Under the Silver Lake Is The Poor Man's Inherent Vice

Under the Silver Lake is a movie all about hidden messages, but none of those messages are as hiden as the movie itself, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last May before a prospective June 2018 release. But then the film reviewed mixed marks at the festival and its distributor, A24, delayed it to December 7, 2018. That day came and went without a trace of Under the Silver Lake. What happened? Was Under the Silver Lake doomed to just sit on a shelf somewhere? Then the film got a brief (read: three day long) theatrical run in April 2019 before dropping unceremoniously on Amazon Streaming last week. It's been a long journey for Under the Silver Lake and for some, this highly unusual motion picture will have been more than worth the wait. For me, it turned out to be a movie that would have been underwhelming even if I had been waiting just five minutes for it to arrive.


Sam (Andrew Garfield) lives in Los Angeles and spends his days immersed in pop culture of the past, avoiding paying his rent and ogling women he sees as merely objects for his titillation. One night, he ensures that he can spend a prolonged period of time interacting with his neighbor Sarah (Riley Keogh). The two spend a few hours together and plan to hang out again the following day...but the next day Sarah's apartment is totally empty! Where'd she go? That's what Sam wants to know as he begins to spend every waking minute trying to track down Sarah and in the process, he begins to become convinced that there are secret codes everywhere that could lead him to a far larger conspiracy.

Under the writing and direction of David Robert Mitchell (the man responsible for It Follows), Under the Silver Lake clearly wants to be a Thomas Pynchon novel or even a quasi-Mulholland Drive exercise, but all it’ll do is make you appreciate all the more just how good the Inherent Vice movie and Mulholland Drive were. Messiness is inherent to this films DNA but it ends up being the monotonous kind of messy that's no fun to watch. But first, some positives, because there are virtues to be fund in here. Mitchell’s work as a director continues to be exceptional, the film looks great in terms of camerawork. Mitchell continues to lean heavily on wide shots like he did with It Follows but for a different reason with Silver Lake. That earlier horror film used those types of shots to emphasize Maika Monroe’s protagonist being dwarfed by the creepiness surrounding her. Meanwhile, Silver Lake uses wide shots as way to visually reaffirm how Andrew Garfield’s protagonist believes he's become embroiled in a larger conspiracy. The frame is made to be as vast in scope as Sam's paranoia.

Speaking of Sam, he’s brought to life through Andrew Garfield in a pretty good lead performance that reinforces his range as a performer, there's no trace of his Social Network or Silence roles here for sure. It's especially interesting how Garfield makes Sam's scumminess feel so abrasive. For instance, when the character goes on an impromptu rage-filled monologue about his hatred of the homeless, Garfield plays it like a volcano of anger just erupting in the form of a verbal stream of consciousness. You just wanna inch away from this obviously very disturbed individual in that scene and throughout the movie.  Garfield plays this character like he’s constantly two seconds away from whipping out a 40-page thesis on how The Last Jedi ruined his childhood that also contains a multitude of grievances against Tinder for banning him. 

His performance is probably the most interesting way Under the Silver Lake dissects the toxic way men objectify women. To get into how the film stumbles in that regard as well as key flaws in other areas, I have to delve into spoilers for the rest of the review. So...

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The biggest problem with Under the Silver Lake on a writing level is how its ambitions to critique male objectification of women keeps getting undercut by other critical parts of the story. One such parts is the peculiar decision to actually make Garfield’s lead character, a man who experiences multiple dream sequences reaffirming that he see's women as only dogs, actually right in discovering that there is a larger conspiracy at play here. Turns out there's a cult using expansive hidden bomb shelters as part of a plan to ascend to a higher form of existence. This is a film that clearly wants to use Sam's creepy obsession of Sarah as a way to critique the practice of men reducing women to objects, but the critique gets undercut by also making him the one and only person who can undertake a mission to crack an elaborate secret code. It's a difficult task to make your protagonist both an indictment of specifically dangerous male behavior and a Chosen One figure for a treasure hunt movie and Under the Silver Lake just can't pull that balance off at all.

The better scenes of Under the Silver Lake, like an extended visit from an elderly songwriter responsible for writing all the hit pop songs of the last century, undercut Sam's worldview and the idea that cracking all these secret messages will reveal some greater truth. Yet such scenes are outweighed by the greater presence of scenes in Under the Silver Lake where Sam just ends up uncovering and becoming embroiled in an actual large-scale. Similarly undercutting the movies potential introspection of toxic male attitudes towards women is how none of the female characters get much in the way of basic personality. Hell, some with extended portions of dialogue don’t even get names! Such a critical facet of Under the Silver Lake renders the movie akin to Collin Farrell’s politician character in Widows crusading for the plight of women of color in his community while not letting any of those women speak. It’s a straight white dude being cognizant that oppression exists but never offers up the chance for those actually being oppressed the chance to be seen or treated as human beings. 

Silver Lake's story is just full of problems like that that keep dragging it down, with another one of these problems being that, by and large, the supporting characters, both male and female, are pretty forgettable, a notable contrast to the bevy of colorful supporting characters found in the likes of similar superior features such as Southland Tales or Inherent Vice. Under the Silver Lake is such a distinct film that I’d imagine every human being on the planet would have a vastly different reaction to it. That’s mighty admirable to a degree, I just wish Under the Silver Lake hadn’t come off to me as so muddled and constantly tripping over its own feet. It's a massive 1,200 piece puzzle of a movie whose pieces end up failing to fit together.