Director: David Robert Mitchell
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace, Wendy Vaden Hueval, Riki Lindhome, Jennine Cota
Rating: 15
Running time: 139 mins
Release date: 15/03/2019
Staking a claim to be this generation’s BLUE VELVET, writer-director David Robert Mitchell‘s UNDER THE SILVER LAKE is certainly going to be one that will continue to evoke a Marmite-effect amongst critics and film fans as they settle down to watch this.
Mitchell’s LA is a potent mix of dark corridors and even darker spirits – and we are subsequently invited into the world of jobless obsessive Sam (Andrew Garfield), whose obsession with his next door neighbour Sarah (Riley Keough) becomes all the more so when she disappears and apparently has moved out, according to Sam’s disapproving landlord, who has given Sam four days to move out of his abode due to lack of rent payments.
Amidst this obsession is the news report that a billionaire called Jefferson Sevence has gone missing and is providing more than his fair share of mystical questions that Sam is determined to answer alongside his goal to find out what happened to Sarah. As the clues begin to pile up and increase, both his fascination and paranoia, Sam increases his desire to solve the mysteries in a battle for his sanity – and the world he lives in…
Grace Van Patten and Andrew Garfield
At a running time of 140 minutes, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE does need to have a lot to hold the audience’s attention and admittedly the cinematography is the best thing about this film, thanks to Mike Gioulakis’ solid imagery that captures perfectly the style personified in earlier efforts like REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and COLLATERAL.
However, when you focus more on the technical virtues more than what the story is trying to say, then you know the movie is going to struggle. What should be a pulsating mystery thriller coupled with a spiritual journey of the main protagonist is lost amidst plot, subplot and sub-subplot, with subliminal messages and age-old conspiracy theories involving what is hidden in classic pop records (surely the Beatles started this off back in 1967 with SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND?) getting a look-in here too.
One particular subplot involving the title fanzine, which Garfield’s character purchases in a bid to gain insight, is under-used and seems to suggest at one point that this is going to be a graphic novel adapted into a big-screen version a la SIN CITY or WATCHMEN, but there is a genuine lack of sufficient action and suspense to make this one work.
Mitchell has also been influenced seemingly by the likes of Richard Kelly’s DONNIE DARKO and coupled with the David Lynch references (with Garfield not dissimilar in determination as Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont in BLUE VELVET as he tries to piece together the jigsaw), you sense that he had a golden opportunity to make a cohesive and solid work of cinematic art. One can also detect a desire to make a new generation CHINATOWN, but UNDER THE SILVER LAKE falls far short of the Polanski masterpiece.
I am sure that the film will find its fair share of admirers who will spot specifics of meaning in the context and heart of the screenplay Mitchell wrote, but it will be a while before it gains its place as a cult work – if at all.
