‘We crave mystery, ’cause there’s none left…’
People love to dismiss stuff or even laud it for being weird. People who haven’t been exposed to much in terms of cinema labelled Saltburn ‘weird’. It isn’t weird. It’s a great film. It’s a lot of fun. But on the scope of cinematic weirdness, it’s pretty bland. Now. Under the Silver Lake IS weird. Properly freak-out, drug-induced, horror-film-via-LA-sleaze weird. I still don’t quite know what to make of it…
Sam (Andrew Garfield) is a disenchanted slacker scraping a living in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. One night, he meets manic-pixie-dream-girl Sarah (Riley Keogh) and falls hard for her only for her to turn up dead some hours later. This sets Sam on a quest to find answers across the City of Angels.
I’ve never seen a film quite like Under the Silver Lake before. Its closest parallels are probably Maps to the Stars or Babylon or even The Fisher King. All of those films have moments of genius and moments that are just plain bizarre that don’t really work. This movie is no different. It’s an odd follow-up to It Follows from writer-director David Robert Mitchell. A real swing for the fences that veers wildly between the sublime and the ridiculous – sometimes within the same scene. There is one moment within the film in which the music industry is personified as a disgusting and cynical old man (played by Jeremey Bobb under heavy and (deliberately?) unconvincing prosthetics) that genuinely chilled me to the bone.
Films like Under the Silver Lake will always be divisive. I get why some people wouldn’t like it. There are valid criticisms here. Me? After some initial trepidation, I found myself rapt by the end. This is David Lynch via Hitchcock and the modern-day obsession with conspiracy theories – a strange and beautiful mess.