While I appreciated the concept of director David Robert Mitchell's indie horror breakout, It Follows, I wasn't necessarily sold on the film's almost instantaneous recognition as a modern classic. But it showed enough promise from the young filmmaker that I was definitely interested in seeing his next project and that interest only grew the longer it took to arrive. Initially slated for a June 2018 release, the film was pushed all the way to April 2019 before it received a rather unceremonious VOD release three days after being dumped into theaters. But as weird as it is, I can see how a studio would struggle promoting it.
After finding breakout success in horror, Mitchell takes a wildly ambitious left turn, plunging into an opioid induced neo-noir Hollywood satire. Think Repo Man meets Donnie Darko meets Chinatown, through the gaze of a desensitized millennial. It's that fucking bizarre. It's so unexpected at it's every turn that you can't help but become entranced by the dizzying mystery that unfolds as you chase the narrative further and further down the rabbit hole. As trippy as Inherent Vice attempted to be, this achieves the effect so much more successfully. Mitchell pulls so many different threads, extracting meaning from every single encounter that eventually the perplexity of it all is too enticing to look away from.
You become as engrossed in solving each mystery the film presents as Andrew Garfield's character Sam does. Wrapped up in a culture of constant stimulation where sex, drugs, indie comics, video games, and movies just seem to fall into his lap; nothing really stimulates him. He's constantly engaged in a search for deeper truths and meaning behind the dead ends each one of these pursuits leads him to. Digging for meaning in everything form empty pop song lyrics to obscure cereal box puzzles to a video game walk-through in an old issue of Nintendo Power magazine. Under the Silver Lake is about a generation searching for meaning in a superficial and meaningless, pop culture fueled atmosphere.
Which is why Under the Silver Lake is such a phenomenal encapsulation of the modern Hollywood experience. Mitchell seems to have become disenchanted with the Hollywood machine and is exposing some of its hypocrisy and ugly truths behind the industry we so regularly glamorize. There's the idolized rock star who has no idea what the meaning is behind the lyrics he bought. The gorgeous actress who disappears into the shadows as some millionaire's trophy locked away for all time. And yet with each revelation, Sam still never really finds the closure he's looking for. As the film closes, he's still as lost and hopeless as he was when everything started, if not more so.
It's a hell of a trip and if nothing else, you have to admire it for the bold ambition on display here. Mitchell could have very easily made another throwback horror flick like It Follows but instead he's gone out of his way to establish a much wider range and displays an impressive capacity for storytelling on a fairly groundbreaking level. You truly wont see another film like this in 2019 and for that, I feel like this has all the signs of a cult classic in the making. With so many films feeling more and more familiar, it takes something truly special to stand out the way this does. Hopefully it eventually finds the audience it deserves.
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