Critics reviews

A shaggy dog mystery whose very essence is a mystery, "Under the Silver Lake" asks a lot of questions and answers them with even more questions. That makes this quintessentially Los Angeles tale a frustrating viewing experience, but its open-endedness will help it rally a cult-like following of believers.

[Under the Silver Lake] is a twisty and delirious fever dream, a movie that explores the extreme weirdness of Los Angeles and our obsession with conspiracy theories, a movie that taps into the wavelengths of David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson. It is often wickedly funny. It is intermittently nightmarish. It features an excellent performance from Andrew Garfield, one that veers between The Dude and Patrick Bateman.

Mitchell’s formal rigor keeps the action fluid even as Silver Lake constantly threatens to become too enamored with its playful digressions.

One of the main debates regarding the film is whether it’s a love letter to Hollywood or unadulterated hate mail, but you know what? It’s both. It’s a movie that loves the art of decades past, dislikes who makes it, and hates who perverts it... Is it a flawed movie? Sure. But it’s also a spectacular middle finger of a film, and that’s just what Mitchell thinks we deserve.

David Robert Mitchell’s direction remains solid, stylish and effective, however Under the Silver Lake is let down by surprisingly sloppy writing and a general lack of focus. The end result is the shaggiest of shaggy dog stories with some wonderful ideas but far too much bloat, practically screaming for a more judicious editor to take a run at the material.

[This] is a rambling shaggy dog of a movie, a flick that recalls the sprawling insanity of “Southland Tales” and the stoner vision of “Inherent Vice”... “Under the Silver Lake” may not come together completely, but it’s the only film I’ve seen this year that reminded me of both David Foster Wallace and Raymond Chandler.

Under the Silver Lake is so wonderfully barbed as a satire of the kinds of dudes who’d spend their time deciphering puzzle movies like this one... that the film can’t help deflating when it demands the very thing it skewers.

A staggering work of mind numbing self importance and borderline toxic nostalgia baiting, Under the Silver Lake is one of the most gorgeous, boring, and nonsensical films ever made... [it] manages to be ambitiously artful and stultifyingly useless at the same time.

Maybe this unceremoniously jettisoned movie — not the movie the industry doesn’t want you to see, just another movie it doesn’t care if you see or not — really does hold the key to unknown truths of the universe. Maybe the emptiness that Sam feels... is more than a mere reflection of this picture’s own nagging emptiness.

Whether all its cereal-prize symbolism, illuminati-adjacent mysticism, and ill-fitting puzzle pieces come together for you is purely a matter of taste. But no matter how shaggy and self-indulgent [Under the Silver Lake] is, or how anticlimactic its big so-what of an ending ends up being, I was never bored.

You can see the influence of Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and others on Under the Silver Lake, but making something that is so all over the place is a balancing act that Mitchell just couldn’t figure out. Robert Altman and The Coen brothers appear to be other influences, but most of this is just posing.

We're still early in David Robert Mitchell's career, but Under the Silver Lake is evidence of a budding major director. There are few greater joys than sitting back and knowing you're in the hands of a master, someone who tells a story with precision and care, and Mitchell's latest is exactly that: tactile and terrifying and fun.