Under the Silver Lake

Andrew Garfield spends a significant portion of Under the Silver Lake smelling like a skunk and looking like he hasn't seen a vegetable in three years. It is a brave, sweaty, and deeply unappealing performance that I absolutely adore. When David Robert Mitchell released this film in 2018, fresh off the massive success of It Follows, the industry expected another streamlined horror hit. Instead, he gave us a sprawling, 139-minute neo-noir odyssey that was so polarizing it basically got buried by A24, receiving a quiet digital dump after a disastrous festival run. I watched this while recovering from a mild fever, which is honestly the optimal way to experience Sam's descent into madness—it makes the logic gaps feel like features, not bugs.

The Purgatory of the Professional Slacker

The setup feels familiar, almost like a "greatest hits" of Los Angeles cynicism. Sam (Andrew Garfield) is a jobless, disenchanted 30-something living in a Silver Lake apartment complex, spying on his neighbors and dodging his landlord. He meets Sarah (Riley Keough), a blonde enigma in a swimming pool who disappears overnight, leaving behind only a cryptic symbol on her wall. What follows isn't a tight procedural, but a shaggy-dog story that feels like The Big Lebowski crashed into Mulholland Drive at a high rate of speed.

Sam’s quest to find Sarah leads him through a labyrinth of pop-culture detritus: secret codes in Nintendo Power magazines, hidden messages in vinyl records played backward, and a "Songwriter" (Jeremy Bobb) who claims to have written every meaningful anthem of the last fifty years while sitting in a tuxedo in a mansion. It’s the ultimate movie for people who spend way too much time on Reddit, capturing that specific contemporary anxiety that everything we love is actually a hollow shell designed to sell us a lifestyle we can't afford.

A Cinematic Fever Dream

Visually, the film is a knockout. Mike Gioulakis, who also shot It Follows, uses wide lenses and slow, creeping pans that make the sunny streets of LA feel deeply predatory. There’s a Hitchcockian lushness to the score by Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace) that contrasts hilariously with Sam’s increasing filthiness. The film is obsessed with the "male gaze," but in a way that feels like a critique of Sam’s own stunted development; he’s looking for a princess to rescue because he can’t figure out how to pay his own rent.

The performance from Andrew Garfield is a career highlight. He captures the twitchy, desperate energy of a man who is convinced he’s the protagonist of a grand mystery, even as the world tells him he’s just a loiterer. His chemistry with the "Bar Buddy" (Topher Grace) provides some of the film's few grounded moments, though even those are tinged with the surreal. The way Sam navigates the Hollywood Forever Cemetery or a party on a rooftop feels less like a journey and more like a feverish drift.

Decoding the Cultural Debris

The reason this film vanished so quickly from the cultural conversation is likely because it refuses to provide easy answers. It arrived right as "Franchise Fatigue" was beginning to set in, offering a dense, original IP that demanded the audience pay attention to background graffiti and cereal box maps. In an era where streaming algorithms reward "background viewing," Under the Silver Lake is a slap in the face. It’s a $8.5 million middle finger to the idea of a coherent plot, and I mean that as a high compliment.

Interestingly, the film has found a second life as a cult classic. Apparently, fans have spent years actually decoding the ciphers hidden in the movie’s production design—some of which lead to real-world coordinates and hidden websites. It’s a film about the danger of looking too closely at things that might be meaningless, which then encourages the audience to do exactly that. The irony is delicious. It also features a sequence involving a "Owl Kiss" urban legend that is genuinely more terrifying than most dedicated horror films released in the last decade.

If you’re looking for a tight mystery with a satisfying payoff, stay far away from this. But if you want to get lost in a beautifully shot, weirdly funny, and deeply cynical exploration of why we obsess over pop culture, this is a hidden treasure. It’s a messy, bloated, brilliant work that says more about our current conspiratorial mindset than almost any other film from the late 2010s. Just make sure you have a change of clothes ready; by the end, you’ll feel just as grimey as Sam.