Under the Silver Lake (2018)

Under the Silver Lake (2018)

American film written and directed by David Robert Mitchell that is part of the official selection of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. It has to be! I can’t remember a good film ever being nominated or ever winning at Cannes!!!!

As a result, I’m not surprised to see this film’s name at the Neuchâtel Festival, in Switzerland, either!

If you’re watching this film for Andrew Garfield, because you’re a Spider-Man fan… you’re likely to be disappointed: you’re clearly going to see other, unexpected facets of the actor. That said, there’s a nod to his Amazing Spider-Man at one point, when he’s in a comic book shop. He does quite well in this role.

If you’re watching this film for Sydney Sweeney, American actress and producer, you should know that some websites haven’t even mentioned her in their introductions to the film. That’s how little she appears!

No, you’ll see Riley Keough here instead… and even then: we’ll mainly see her photo, as she quickly disappears and is sought by the main character. Don’t forget that she’s the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough, as well as the eldest granddaughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. She took Riley, her middle name, as her stage name so as not to take advantage of the fame of her father, whose name is very similar. Riley replaced Dakota Johnson for this role.

You’ll also see Callie Hernandez, who we’ve already seen in a number of films, including Machete Kills (2013), the sequel to Machete (2010), Sin City 2 (2014) and Alien: Covenant (2017), too. She was also in La La Land… but I confess I don’t love any of those films, although La La Land (2016) is worth it, especially for its ending, which deserves that special mention. It’s not bad, but nothing more.

Surprisingly, there’s a distinct lack of emotion here for a romantic film.

Topher Grace (Predators) has a small role again, as in the Black Mirror series and the excellent Heretic (2024). I like him in general. It’s crazy that this actor is one of Hollywood’s rejects! Sometimes it’s so unjustified. Speaking of Spider-Man, for me he was the best Venom.

Riki Lindhome (Gilmore Girls, Pulse, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), is an actress who plays music in a comedy duo (Garfunkel and Oates) with Kate Micucci. is also on board. Always with a good sense of humour!

She began her filmography with a poignant film : Million Dollar Baby. That said, she has been in some horrible films, such as The Last House on the Left, in which she made us laugh even less. She did the voice of Popsicle in the Sponge Bob movie! and Poison Ivy in The Lego Batman Movie. She appeared in the remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

I’m not going to mention all the actors, because there are far too many… but Patrick Fischler (Swimming with Sharks, Speed, The Shadow, Mulholland Drive) is excellent in his role as the author of the fanzine (called ‘Under the Silver Lake’, by the way!), who is a fan of conspiracy theories. He also has mouldings of the faces of many famous people. By displaying them against his living room wall, he has created a wall full of masks of the same colour. One of the best things about the film!

Zosia Mamet is also part of this great cast. She is an American singer, who is also a member of the group Chacha, and actress.

The music in the film is excellent! When there are musical scenes in films, they are often among the best moments. Seeing Andrew Garfield and Grace Van Patten dance to ‘What’s the frequency, Kenneth?’ by R.E.M. is a real treat. It’s always a pleasure to hear White Town – Your Woman too. A band was even created for the film, apparently: ‘Jesus & The Brides Of Dracula’ and their song is ‘Turning Teeth’. It’s really good stuff! In fact, the song is written and performed by none other than Californian band Silversun Pickups.

I’ve read a lot of negative things about this film. And yet I enjoyed watching it for quite a while, noting the references, the winks, the subtle touches of humour that stand out among the heavy-handed jokes. But, unfortunately, by the time I got to the end, it was clear that I’d once again wasted my time on a film that wasn’t worth the trouble, despite being well made. And yet I’m a very good viewer.

We see records, record players and the madness of turning albums upside down to hear any hidden messages.

There’s the Mario Bros game as we knew it in its early days with the NES (Nintendo). There are posters of Wolf Man and Kurt Cobain in the main character’s bedroom.

There’s a pianist playing Erik Satie. Followed by countless other well-known songs whose titles will swarm in the end credits. It’s rare to see so many pieces of music in the credits.

Composer Disasterpeace, who already wrote the music for Mitchell’s previous film, It Follows (2014), has returned to write the feature-length soundtrack.

Great! Let me be very clear:

This film takes a serious direction and it may take a moment to realise that it can only be a comedy film. There are some really funny situations, but above all this film is unbelievably absurd and deadly boring. If you don’t like that, you’ll have to pass!

A zany, implausible scenario in which the director could have given us a message. I suppose the trailer doesn’t reflect the reality of this piece of rubbish at all. I already didn’t love It Follows (2014), even though it’s an important horror film because of its originality, but David Robert Mitchell is back with a film that mixes old conspiracy theories and mostly fat humour.

Basically, I can be quite a fan of independent, not-at-all mainstream, thought-provoking films… but I didn’t enjoy this film and it was a big mistake to think it would be really good. It’s a completely absurd story.

One very important thing to stress is that none of the characters are totally endearing! In fact, they’re all relatively detestable and none of them are really worth saving, so horrifying are they (the main character, the missing girl, the neighbour with the parrot, and everyone else you meet along the way).

There are, however, two rather embarrassing but amusing sex scenes. One is a couple having sex while having a normal conversation, looking at photos and the news on TV. I have to admit I found it quite funny. The other is a masturbation scene that proves to all men that they are probably very normal and similar. And the outcome of the scene is not what I feared. It ends rather well, if I do say so myself!

Basically, this film starts off very well and the more the story unfolds, the worse it gets. It starts out in total absurdity (while you’re desperately trying to understand the plot and the investigation) and ends up in indigestible mush. And over 2 hours 20 minutes, it’s very hard. Yes, this film is far too long! The investigation is interesting for the main protagonist, but not for the viewer. Not all incomprehensible films are as excellent as The Big Lebowski (1998), which also has incredible dialogue.
This film is probably like what it’s trying to denounce: completely hollow and meaningless.

Its interest lies in this guy who’s looking for an answer to the disappearance of a girl he barely knows. I wanted to know how it was all going to work out and, above all, to get to the bottom of the disappearance. But the young man finds himself embroiled in a series of really ridiculous events, with no logic whatsoever. In principle, I have nothing against this kind of delirium, but here, it just doesn’t sit well.

What’s going on underneath that silver lake? Nothing! Over two hours of red herrings and plot inconsistencies, culminating in an ending worthy of a pathetic naïve film.

If you like solving mysteries, this is not the film for you! If you like the city of L.A., there’s surely something better for you. For his third film (he also made The Myth of the American Sleepover), director David Robert Mitchell offers us a fascinating plunge into the abyss of stupidity. Use your time for a good nap rather than getting into this.

Of course, there are also those who have found this film to be an unmissable masterpiece! Their point of view is that it’s interesting to see adolescence as a curse, where sex, violence, disillusionment and paranoia come together in a nihilistic vision. This quest for identity by a character who no longer knows when things went wrong is perfectly interwoven with a description of the civilisation around him, where everyone is lost in a distant utopia.

With its new age sects, carnivalesque prostitutes, superficial hipsters, neighbours dressed as if in a porno, and high society figures dressed up as puppets at offbeat parties, Los Angeles resembles a gigantic, libidinous human theatre that is more than just a city of pure cinema. A fabulous backdrop for a hallucinatory journey of initiation, in which the director cites Lynch, Hitchcock, De Palma and Altman, as well as numerous references to video games, comic books, advertising and music. So many pieces in this giant labyrinthine chessboard full of subliminal memories and hidden messages. In fact, there are even real chess games at one point in the film.

The way the streets and their inhabitants are filmed is reminiscent of Mulholland Drive (2001), while the thriller aspect is reminiscent of Vertigo (1958), Fenêtre sur Cour/Rear Window (1954) and Blow Out (1981). The wandering and the tone may bring to mind The Long Goodbye (1973) or Southland Tales (2006), but this is truly a film by David Robert Mitchell, who ‘digests an incalculable number of works to produce a unique film, a kind of cathartic and terminal L.A. noir thriller, the sum total of an entire branch of cinema’, as another critic wrote.

I also found this excellent commentary: “Each encounter is a step further and a description of characters, each more crazy or lost than the last, in an environment where poetry and triviality mingle, chastity and raw sex, or reality and unreality. The result is an absorbing, demanding but terribly rich tale, with a real metaphorical rhetoric that’s often deadpan, where the absurd meets black comedy, like this special “conspiracy theory” sequence in the home of a reclusive individual who collects sculptures of famous faces.”
Well… it’s a very exaggerated vision!!!

It’s up to each person to see or not see what suits them. Personally, I haven’t seen any of it… though I’ve tried!