Under the Silver Lake (2018)

An unemployed, soon-to-be-evicted, for some reason bad-smelling, dishevelled young man is looking for a disappeared woman who only met once, only to start getting obsessed with a Los Angeles conspiracy.

David Robert Mitchell… probably most known for It Follows (2014), comes back, still paying tribute to John Carpenter, but also Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma with a neo-noir mystery/crime about a lifestyle only known to the City of Angels. If Body Double (1984) and They Live (1988) are films you haven’t watched yet, you must do so either before or after this. Under the Silver Lake is one of those films that can be interpreted in multiple ways. “Attacking” pop culture, being pedantic to the millennials, “accusing” the old guard for manipulating the youth, diminishing the star system’s mentality, criticising Hollywood’s lifestyle, touching on mental illness… all these, and more, are possible interpretations that one can give to Mitchell’s work.

Pay attention to the recurring themes, the coincidences, the resemblances with past popular films – especially Hitchcock’s, the REM song Sam dances to, the way the girl drowns (no spoilers)… Mitchell is an asset to the independent American cinema; he implements techniques from studio-level films to indies that are doomed to make any money whatsoever but add quality to the American cinema and allow actors to unfold their talents by fully expressing themselves and be seen to the audience in a way that, more often than not, Hollywood derives from them. Of course, critics were divided, and, of course, Hollywood’s system rejected it. Leaning on Hitchcock’s tombstone and having drinks on Grace Kelly’s grave is an allusion to an arguably inequitable system that really respects no one and nothing.

I’ve never been to L.A., so I’m unsure if that lifestyle somewhat represents how certain people live. But not having a job, spending money you don’t have, not caring if you’re gonna be evicted, paying for hookers with the above-mentioned money you don’t have, and all that in an astronomically expensive city where, somehow, everything and everyone is related to the movie industry, where they can go to parties that happen every night – uninvited, seems like a world within a world that only the people living there, and somehow can afford it (or not), understand it. Did I mention disregarding at the same time killers been after you? But then, I guess, that very same lifestyle might also be the root of this superfluous paranoia…

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