Under the Silver Lake

50s Hollywood noir, 80s action-adventure films, Lynchian rabbit holes into the unknown. Sacred objects and spaces, objectively and emotionally. All the world's mysteries have been cracked, but how do They themselves connect, internally and externally. Why pop culture is meaningful, how it becomes us, and why that can be harmful. The toxicity of being nurtured by artifical heroes who succeed in a fake world, but the sympathy of why one would recede entirely, to the place where meaning was born.

A mid-2000s manic pixie dream girl coming-of-age meets detective movie except all of the impossibly hot and horny girls are even more lazily written than a played-out stock character I thought we had moved beyond. I would have loved this movie as a fourteen year old for obvious reasons. Where the film really fails is in assuming the audience's sympathy for the idiot protagonist and his conspiracy nonsense. It's 'Mulholland Drive' lite but what you're imagining is probably better.

The film never gives us a reason to care about Sarah or Sam and the journey they both undertake. The film leads us on a two hour, twenty-minute quest across Los Angeles and the final reveal is something undeserving of the sheer bonkers film-making that comes before it.

Garfield is very funny in the role and there are some interesting themes of the around how obsessive media consumption is used to fill holes within us and about rings of alienation emanating outwards from the small core of people who are actually "important." Some of it works, some of it doesn't, but Garfield is consistently funny throughout as a socially awkward maladaptive.

Supersized, but not bloated. The heaviness of the male gaze is uncomfortable, but not without meaning. Alternately and simultaneously hilarious, creepy, thrilling, and thought-provoking. The set pieces are excellent, what seems to be a sort of specialty David Robert Mitchell, considering for instance the swimming pool scene in It Follows. Another excellent film for him.

A film begging you to read meaning into every line of dialogue and every carefully crafted shot, but without being a film you care enough about to go through the effort.

A fun, weird, cryptic movie. Something of a puzzle that rumble in my head even 3 months later. The film is somewhat slow and wont resolve everything, it can bother you a lot.