‘Under the Silver Lake’ Review

July 15, 2020 Gabriel

It’s a strange world we live in where one of the year’s best movies gets dumped on VOD with no theatrical release or marketing campaign. Perhaps it’s some sort of conspiracy.

Under the Silver Lake is the latest feature from David Robert Mitchell, director of It Follows, one of the greatest movies ever made. Trying to classify it is a bit difficult. It’s a comedy-drama-mystery-suspense-type thing with a heavy dose of satire. Basically, if you’ve ever read (or at least tried to read) a Thomas Pynchon book, you know what you’re in for. Nevertheless, it’s damn great.

UTSL follows Andrew Garfield as a book smart, street dumb, paranoid slacker as he delves into a web of conspiracy theories in an attempt to find his neighbor who has mysteriously disappeared. To put it that simply is a disservice to how dense the movie is. It’s a Gordian Knot and there’s no sword to cut through everything. The great big conspiracy is built on layers and layers of pop culture, both dead and living, hidden messages in songs, movies, magazines, video games, and advertisements, and set in a world where nothing is real and everything is for sale and intertwined with the paranoid rambling of the mentally ill and the empty dreams of starstruck wannabes. It’s a pretty good encapsulation of the beautiful disaster that is LA and, by extension, America as a whole.

The story is episodic by nature, and indulges in the strange and the extravagant, all while shifting tones and juggling ideas from vignette to vignette with expert skill. The comedy is funny, the suspenseful moments are unsettling, the dramatic moments are emotionally fraught, everything works very well and on top of it all, everything looks moody and gorgeous and the score is top notch.

Much criticism has been leveled at the movie regarding its treatment of women. The story of the movie is sex-driven in that sex as a need, a drug, or a commodity fuels much of the narrative. Many female characters are props of some form or another, and the whole movie has been accused of being very male-gaze-y (go figure). All this could be considered a problem, depending on your point of view, but it works very effectively in a movie that’s about a world where women are treated less like people and more like pieces of meat.

UTSL has received a lot of backlash for a multitude of reasons, some of which seem less reasonable than others. Sure it’s convoluted and the plot is full of red-herrings and meaningless detail, but movies aren’t just plots to be solved like math problems, they’re experiences to be had and I would argue that every choice, every bizarre detail, and every diversion in UTSL contributes to that experience more than it detracts. Others have complained about a lack of interesting or deep characters, which I definitely understand, but I would say the movie is more about the audience’s experience of the story and less about the people in the movie, who are all caricatures anyway.

The last, and strangest, common criticism is that for all it’s complex machinations, the movie doesn’t have anything interesting to say. I would disagree wholeheartedly. At the heart of Under the Silver Lake are a handful of truths that are pretty obvious, but they are truths that everyone seems to be in denial about. It’s true that pop culture exerts a pernicious level of power of the shaping of the collective consciousness, and that the people who control that output are far removed form the lives and concerns of ordinary people, thus we, at some level, are all just dancing to their tune. It’s also true that Hollywood (or any center of power and influence) is a pit that devours and destroys the young, the beautiful, and the naive, especially women. We all know these things are real, but then go on pretending they aren’t, so it’s nice to have a movie state them so plainly.

It remains to be seen what the rest of 2019 has to offer, but as of today’s date (5/23/2019), Under the Silver Lake is the best movie of the year. Despite polarizing reviews and A24’s attempt to bury it in the 9th circle of distribution hell, it’s a movie well worth seeing. It’s fun, thought provoking, and very well made. It’s a movie informed by decades of American cultural history, but is very much of its time, a vital encapsulation of our current cultural moment.