The ultimate Fantastic Fest experience is coming out of a movie and saying to yourself, a la Krusty the Clown, “What the hell was that?” That’s not a bad thing, because it usually applies to a film so fascinating and headscratching that immediate responses border on bafflement. And so it is this year with Under the Silver Lake.
Much as his 2014 slow-burn horror It Follows was defined by Detroit, David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up is a Los Angeles love letter – more specifically, how the tragically hip neighborhood of Silver Lake lives a tangential existence to the glamour of Hollywood and Beverly Hills.
The closest Sam (Andrew Garfield) comes to a cinematic existence is playing Rear Window – or rather peeping tom, spying on on his female neighbors, including the enigmatic young starlet Sarah (Riley Keough). When she disappears after one night of platonic engagement, Sam sets off to find her. But when it comes to digging up the truth, he’s less Sam Spade, more Sam Dollar Store Plastic Beach Trowel.
His investigation is red herrings and diversions, circular weirdness and tangents including (but not limited to) dog murders, independent comics, missing billionaires, secret mythologies, art pop goths, heiresses, skunks. Everything and nothing is important, and after a while the idea of a linear plot has been so thoroughly discarded as to be naught but a fond memory.
Imagine this film as a ball bearing, trapped between three magnets: Imagine one of those magnets is marked Inherent Vice; another, Southland Tales; the third says Head, and every so often it plays a Monkees’ song. The ball bearing rips between the magnetic fields of each one, seemingly randomly. The slacker philosophizing can turn into preposterous myth-making or dope-tinged weirdness with a flux in the electrons.
What holds it all together is Garfield. Present in every scene and just about every frame, he’s the epitome of lackluster modern man, searching for something like meaning in riddles and conspiracies (which are there, but knowing that never seems to do him much good). His awkward shamble and bursts of manic energy bind all the other disparate elements together.
But those elements are there, and crammed in, like Mitchell was stuffing every thought he’d had into a suitcase and is sat on it, hoping there’s some order in there. It’s never dull or incompetently made – sometimes even bordering on the spectacular – but it’s so hard to make either cerebral or emotional sense out of it. Wild moments, like the belly laughs when Sam deals out some street corner justice to some car-wrecking teens, or the loop de loop payoff to a brief reference to the cover of the November 1970 issue of Playboy, or some of the most gorgeous matte painting work in decades, are counterbalanced by scenes loaded with halfway recognizable character actors that go basically nowhere. Mitchell clearly has a point to make: It’s just not apparent whether even he has a firm grasp on what it is.
Under the Silver Lake
US PremiereFantastic Fest runs Sept. 20-27. For more news, reviews, and interviews, as well as our daily show with the oneofus.net podcast network, visit austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.
This article appears in September 21 • 2018.
