What’s Under the Silver Lake? Just Vibes, Apparently
*Some slight spoilers ahead.
Have you ever seen a movie that had more vibes than it did concept? It does not, by the way, make it a bad movie. Sometimes a solid, distinct aesthetic can be more memorable than a storyline. I think of Mid90s, The Bad Batch, The Neon Demon, Only Lovers Left Alive—all without complicated plots, all sporting immaculate vibes. The settings and the soundtracks transport you to incredibly specific environments, bringing a particular feeling with each of them. Under the Silver Lake was fraught with vibes of all varieties, ranging from dazzling to ridiculous. An intriguing set up, placed against the backdrop of a diet Hitchcockian neo-noir Los Angeles? Sign me up!
To its credit, Under the Silver Lake painted a uniquely weird picture of LA and its locals, both critiquing them and handling them with care. The eeriness of running into the same people at every random party or event, the incessant desire for authenticity and truth within a community of strangely self-assured people—these are the markers of Los Angeles, these are the signifiers of an engaging mystery. I’m not sure how much is exactly accomplished with all of these puzzle pieces: a dog murderer, a missing girl, a secret society of the elite—and one begins to wonder if all of these pieces were truly necessary by the end of the film.
Our protagonist is unreliable and generally un-likable, but still we follow him on his confusing caper to find answers (despite the fact that he seems genuinely unconcerned that his rent is past due and he’s in danger of being evicted.) What follows is a series of scenes that trail mysterious women around Hollywood, searching through lavish parties and baseball fields and underground tunnels to find the truth. During his search for his missing dream girl (that he only met once) he quickly finds himself engrossed in a clandestine world of weirdos that even the most native Angelenos would find bizarre. And although he is able to crack some of the codes laid out for him, we’re still left with a lot of loose ends—the least interesting of which being the discovery of the missing girl who started it all. By the end of the film, our wannabe detective gets 500 Days of Summer-ed, when the girl he’s been searching desperately for says “you barely know me”. It’s a disappointing but appropriate end for our protagonist, but for a film that promised some impressively menacing foes, this viewer felt generally un-spooked and un-shook by the payoff.
David Robert Mitchell accomplished so much with so little in his previous film It Follows, by creating a simple yet suspenseful story that felt genuinely terrifying, despite its minimal plot. Under the Silver Lake, felt heavy-handed in comparison, with far more characters and red herrings than necessary. This, served with a large helping of the male gaze, further distracted from the plot. I love a beautiful aesthetic and I love a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and this film was, at its core, an homage to old Hollywood and it’s impossible ambition, however I wish Under the Silver Lake had delivered on what it had set out to do.
