Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Young and disenchanted Sam meets a mysterious and beautiful woman who's swimming in his building's pool one night. When she suddenly vanishes the next morning, Sam embarks on a surreal quest across Los Angeles to decode the secret behind her disappearance, leading him into the murkiest depths of mystery, scandal and conspiracy.
Under the Silver Lake is a genuinely singular neo-noir fever dream from David Robert Mitchell, dripping with Pynchonesque paranoia and LA mythology. Its cinematography is lush and inventive, evoking classic Hollywood while subverting it with a grimy, sun-bleached surrealism. Andrew Garfield commits fully to the slacker-detective role with charm and physical comedy. The film's novelty is its strongest suit — a maximalist, obsessive conspiracy tapestry unlike almost anything else in contemporary cinema, layering pop-culture semiotics, secret societies, and dream logic into something unmistakably its own. The plot, however, is deliberately baggy and self-indulgent, rewarding patient viewers but frustrating many others with its endless rabbit holes. The ending deflates rather than detonates, offering a thematic resolution that feels anticlimactic given the elaborate build-up — the conspiracy unravels into existential emptiness in a way that's intentional but unsatisfying.