Under the Silver Lake

Release Date: April 29, 2019
Runtime: 139 minutes
Rating: R
Studio: A24
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Andrew Garfield; Riley Keough; Topher Grace; Riki Lindhome; Chris Gann; Callie Hernandez; Zosia Mamet; Luke Baines;

I have recently come to realize that I prefer to wait a day or two before composing a film review. This lag time provides me with a critical space in which to reflect and process my thoughts on a film and to form a firm, objective, and articulate response. Unless I’ve had a strong, visceral reaction to a movie, I won’t write my review immediately, especially if I’ve taken extensive notes on the film while viewing it. This was the process in which I wrote the following review for Under the Silver Lake.

Taking its name from the hip and hilly Los Angeles enclave to the east of Hollywood, Under the Silver Lake is a piece of neo- film noir that David Lynch would be proud of. A homeless man dressed as a king who serves as a sort-of quasi-mystic for our protagonist, gorgeous people barking like dogs, cat-like murderous humanoids skulking through homes in the middle of the night…this is unquestionably a weird movie populated with weird characters. The least weird of whom is Sam (Andrew Garfield), an about-to-be-evicted from his (pretty nice) LA apartment, jobless layabout who wastes away his days lying to his mother about being at work, not combing his hair, and smoking on his apartment’s balcony. One afternoon, Sam spies (Rear Window-style) a beautiful unknown girl (is there any other kind?) sunning herself by the pool at his apartment complex. Here is our mystery…who is this girl? Sam eventually discovers that the unknown girl is Sarah (Riley Keough), a fellow layabout. Of course, since Sarah is beautiful and exotic, genre conventions dictate that Sam must immediately be smitten and the girl must, just as immediately, disappear. Sarah’s abrupt disappearance prompts Sam to start sleuthing about the Los Angeles night world armed with a Polaroid of Sarah, asking anyone who isn’t wasted if they’ve seen her.

Writer/director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, The Myth of the American Sleepover) sets up the puzzle nicely and Garfield is terrific in the Sam Spade-grizzled private eye role. Since Garfield holds the screen with his slacker charisma, the audience isn’t resistant to accompany him on his quest to find the missing Sarah. Is her disappearance connected to the odd man dressed as a pirate who keeps popping up? Is there a connection to be had between Sarah and the Shooting Star call girl service? What about the two alluring nymphs that seem to show up everywhere Sam goes? And what does all of this have to do with the bizarre disappearance of local magnate Jefferson Sevence? And most importantly, do we care?

The answer is…mostly yes. Initially, it seems as though Mitchell might be headed towards Richard Kelly-Southland Tales territory. The sun-drenched, yet somehow grimy LA milieu and ambitious scope of both films is similar. However, while its story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and some plot holes are left frustratingly unresolved, Under the Silver Lake is much more focused and not nearly as infuriating a picture as Southland Tales. For one thing, this film is centered on one protagonist (Sam) and one storyline rather than attempting to corral a multitude of stories into one cohesive narrative. Furthermore, Under the Silver Lake clearly asserts its film noir intentions straight off the bat: we have a clear detective, a clear femme fatale, a possible murder, LA setting, colorful sideline characters, etc.

Andrew Garfield inhabits the unassuming, unshaven, and generally unkempt sleuth role well: this is one versatile actor. As Sam moves from one odd experience to another, Garfield registers as much confusion and bewilderment as the audience in terms of where the road to Sarah is leading him. Keough (stunning, just like her mother, Lisa Marie Presley), as Sarah, radiates the femme fatale’s beauty coupled with naïveté, but with a layer of danger bubbling just beneath the surface; she’s one of the guys but she will just as easily drop poison into your beer. When we first officially meet Sarah, she is swathed in the requisite uniform of the femme fatale: wide-brim hat with blonde hair flowing from underneath and a white silk dress that reads virginal yet sexy.

Mitchell clearly has an eye and affection for the sweet-but-sour underbelly of the City of Angels, and he (along with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis) photographs the city in all of its dreamy hangover haze. The whole movie looks like what you figure might happen if Chinatown and Mulholland Dr. had a baby. Even though every character in this film (except for Sam) looks clean and shiny, you understand in this movie that everyone is hiding a rotten and shifty core. But for all of the pretty vacuousness in Under the Silver Lake, the film would most love to sermonize to us by couching itself in social commentary. Well, we don’t necessarily need a feature length PSA, much less a slightly bloated two hours and nineteen minute PSA.