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.

It Follows Review

Fearful Following Frightens

It was interesting leaving my screening of It Follows, as I heard the other audience members murmur to each other their thoughts on the film, which ran quite contrary to mine. "I could film a better movie in my garage!" "What terrible acting!" "Nothing even happened!" It was pity to hear that, as I was sorry to hear these viewers had not enjoyed the movie like I had. As they say, one mans trash is another mans treasure, or in this case, the slower pace they found to be excruciating was something I found to be exhilarating.