Under the Silver Lake (2018)

What happens if you combine everything that you like? What happens when you put every single one of your loves and influences into a big, swirling, freewheeling passion project? Is it a wise decision? Under the Silver Lake goes for it, and the result is catastrophic. Cryptic indie darling David Robert Mitchell is very clearly a fan of Alfred Hitchcock, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Altman, James Ellroy, Brian de Palma, Paul Thomas Anderson, comic books, Playboy magazine, NES video games, Richard Kelly, David Lynch and Bernard Herrmann. He mashes all of these disparate influences together without wit or reason, creating a sea of references and ideas that doesn’t add up to anything. Teenage boys who don’t know any better will probably get a kick out of it. I didn’t.

Scuzzy, unemployed, broke millennial Sam (Andrew Garfield) lives in a spacious Los Angeles apartment decorated with pristine framed posters and a brand new shiny TV. He spends his days ogling random women, leafing through old copies of Playboy and lazing around his apartment. After noticing a pretty new neighbour named Sarah (Riley Keough), Sam is invited to her apartment. The two develop a bond before she goes missing, clearing out her apartment and leaving no trace of her whereabouts. Through investigating strange symbols dotted around the city, an indie band’s discography, an odd graphic novel, retro adverts and a small group of women who visit Sarah’s empty apartment, Sam discovers a bizarre conspiracy connected to a dead millionaire.

Mitchell has no idea what he wants to say or what style his movie should take, so he mashes together absolutely everything that he can think of. The resulting mess is a spectacular failure: an overstuffed collage so garish and nonsensical that it screams to be torn apart and cast into a roaring bonfire. There’s nothing original, provocative, sexy, exciting, clever or funny about this film. It contains nothing but references to other movies that are original, provocative, sexy, exciting, clever and funny. It’s like listening to twelve different bands playing their loudest songs at the same time, or eating a sandwich stuffed with ham, cheese, toothpaste, Lego, seaweed and vermouth. It’s a cluttered, unfocused, unwise mess convinced of its own importance and sly genius. If you haven’t seen any of the great films that prop the whole project up, you might be tricked by it. This is the worst sin of all.

Scenes where Sam uses a pair of binoculars to spy on his neighbours are clear nods to Rear Window. If this wasn’t obvious enough, a Rear Window poster hanging on Sam’s wall should clue you in. Driving scenes where Sam slowly tails various women to the strains of a mock-Herrmann score are blatant references to Vertigo. The main thrust of the narrative, a loser stoner follows a complex mystery revolving around beautiful women in LA, is a pastiche of Inherent Vice and The Long Goodbye. The appearance of an inexplicable pirate, character actor Patrick Fischler’s small role and a scene where a band performs soft music against a red curtain are nods to David Lynch. The conspiracy of the wealthy and the sprawling parodic spin on surreal Californian extravagance bring to mind Richard Kelly’s film maudit Southland Tales. The parade of references goes on and on and on until the film becomes a plagiarism pick and mix.

After the nods to fellow filmmakers, Mitchell starts delving into Hollywood lore. Dream images of Keough by a swimming pool quote the publicity shots from the incomplete Marilyn Monroe film Something’s Gotta Give. The bust of James Dean’s head outside Griffith Observatory is linked to the grand conspiracy. Sydney Sweeney leans against a huge stone with the words ALFRED HITCHOCK written on it. This dreadful film falsely believes that constantly referencing the icons of great cinema will grant it some of the same greatness. It’s embarrassing. The latter half of the film delves into a stew of undercooked ideas: bomb shelters, an ancient songwriter who secretly composed every single hit song since the 1950s, a nude angel of death who kills at night, a dog murderer, a homeless man wearing a crown, ancient Egypt and barking women. There are countless YouTube videos and reddit posts created by pseudointellectual 19-year-olds desperate to figure out the film’s mysteries. What does it mean? Nothing. It means absolutely nothing.

Take a scene where Sam wakes in a graveyard to the noise of his ringing phone. His mother is on the other end of the line, and she immediately chats about the 1920s actress Janet Gaynor. Sam looks up and sees that he’s lying on Janet Gaynor’s grave! This means absolutely nothing! Its a pointless, hollow reveal that functions well as a simulacrum of the entire movie. In a failed attempt at empty titillation, almost every single actress walks around unclothed. Mitchell tries to justify it with an offhand, non-committal line about the male gaze that falls flat on its face with a cringeworthy thud. I’m not in any way opposed to nudity or sexuality on screen, but this film has no idea what to do with it. Like all of its ideas and references, sex is dangled in front of the camera in a desperate attempt to create something. It isn’t sexy and it isn’t a critical look at the way that men treat women: it’s just boobs. I didn’t find sexist as much as I found it a bit sad, like discovering a middle-aged man’s poorly-hidden porn stash.

The production design and photography both irritated me. Under the Silver Lake is an incredibly clean film trying very hard to look unclean. Rooms are designed to look messy and disorganised, with clothes, bags and bottles randomly dotted around tables and mattresses, but every single space has an IKEA-showroom shine. They clearly haven’t been lived in, or even touched by a human being before the camera rolled. Sam’s couch, tables and TV are clearly brand-new and untouched. His stacks of 30-year-old old Playboy and Nintendo Power magazines aren’t crumpled, creased or torn. They’re newly-printed reproductions. No effort at all was put into realistically creating the kind of space that a scuzzy Hollywood loser would live in. The digital photography is a horrible compliment to this travesty of production design, capturing every surface with the kind of sparkling white texture that should accompany a bleach advert. Look at Inherent Vice or The Long Goodbye and you’ll immediately recognise just how much of a failure Mitchell’s film is.

Andrew Garfield shouldn’t be the lead. Anyone would struggle to play Sam, a muddled and incomplete character, but Garfield’s lovable shaggy-haired slacker vibe is a bad match. Sam is supposed to be perverted, obsessive and a little dangerous. He explodes in moments of sudden violence and spies on the women who live next door. Garfield fails to suggest any kind of menace or depth to the character, playing his part as a stoned version of Peter Parker. An Adam Driver or even a Robert Pattinson could have done so much more, making Sam’s obsessiveness threatening and tense. Remember the ambiguity and edge of James Stewart in Rear Window and Vertigo. Remember Joaquin Phoenix’s dishevelled layabout in Inherent Vice. Garfield simply isn’t up to the standard set by the actors who came before him. His limp performance sinks any goodness that the film might possibly contain, reducing it to a failed scrapheap of interest only to the pubescent Reddit mob. What a waste.