Under the Silver Lake

Silver Lake, Los Angeles. The city of angels. The dream factory where it’s all too easy to lose contact grasp of Earth and see nothing but stars... Take for example Sam (Andrew Garfield), a prototypical slacker in his mid-thirties, without ambition… though he does have an unpredictable temperament, a penchant for voyeurism, and an unhealthy obsession with pop culture. When a mysterious neighbor (Riley Keough) appears in the sights of his binoculars, then disappears overnight without a trace, the first-class geek cannot help but investigate – possessed, somehow, by the eternal spirit of the countless detectives who stalked the hot asphalt of LA before him. But a Bogart he is not. Sam's unorthodox methods very quickly leave him confounded; through the looking glass and into the heart of a strange city where dog killers, owl-women, aspiring actresses and gurus rub shoulders, among other high-society demiurges pulling the strings of an entire culture...

David Robert Mitchell (of the instant cult hit (IT FOLLOWS) returns with UNDER THE SILVER LAKE, a deliriously sunny neo-noir, seeking to fill the gap between Thomas Pynchon (INHERENT VICE) and James Ellroy (THE BLACK DAHLIA), David Lynch (MULHOLLAND DR.) and Robert Altman (THE LONG GOODBYE), among an abundance of other references to the classics of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Offbeat, ambitious, willfully messy and multifarious, the work Mitchell has crafted here is as excessive as it is exuberant; a catch-all of influences, providing the filmmaker an ideal playground through which to refine his mise-en-scene, to experiment with different styles and tones, and, to tackle the hypnotic, inescapable power of the multitude of images that shape us. – Ariel Esteban Cayer