Under the Silver Lake premiered on May 15, 2018, at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or, before being released nationwide in France on August 8. It was theatrically released in the United States on April 19, 2019, by A24. The film polarized critics; while its originality, direction, soundtrack, cinematography, and Garfield's performance were praised, some found the screenplay confusing, too cryptic, and lacking the substance and depth the film aimed for.
Plot
In the summer of 2011, Sam is an aimless 33-year-old in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, interested in conspiracy theories and hidden messages in popular culture, spying and indulging in sexual activities with various women, and uninterested in paying his overdue rent. One morning, Sam sees a news report detailing the disappearance of billionaire Jefferson Sevence. He spies on his mysterious new neighbor, Sarah, who notices him and later gets high with Sam while watching How to Marry a Millionaire. As they begin to kiss, Sarah's two roommates interrupt and Sarah suggests Sam come back the next day. Fireworks go off nearby as they stand outside Sarah’s apartment, and Sam comments that it’s a bit late in the summer for them. For a moment Sarah seems transfixed, before giving him a breathless goodbye.
In the morning, Sam discovers Sarah and her roommates have moved out overnight, and becomes obsessed with learning what happened. He breaks into Sarah's former apartment encountering a strange symbol and flees when a woman, Troy, comes by to pick up a box. Sam follows Troy and her two friends to Downtown Los Angeles to a rooftop party, meeting Allen and Emerald who points out Jefferson's daughter, Millicent, who becomes upset and leaves over learning of her father's death, and he meets the Balloon Girl and a Jesus bandmate "bride" who gives Sam a cookie that is a ticket to a private show at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. On television, Sam discovers that Jefferson burned to death in a car with three women. He recognizes Sarah's hat at the scene, and a small dog similar to hers is found dead. Sam visits the Comic-man, the author of comics called Under the Silver Lake, Sam finds out that the symbol seen in Sarah's apartment is a Hobo code meaning; "stay quiet" and the Comic-man explains that hidden symbols and codes are everywhere in modern society and gives Sam a collector's cereal box with the reverse side that is a Los Angeles map. At the Jesus and the Brides show at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Sam is given a vinyl album handout and meets the Balloon Girl who takes him down below to the Crypt Club and asks her about Sarah who claims to have seen her but never met her and then ditches him when he becomes sick from the cookie but he spots Troy there who gives chase with Sam passing out in front of Janet Gaynor's grave, later learning that Millicent is a fan of Gaynor's paintings which Sam is oblivious to even though he claims to be a fan of the actress.
Throughout his following journey, Sam encounters several strange characters, all of which are seemingly connected to the women's disappearance and the secrets of Los Angeles itself, who all claim to only have seen Sarah but having never met her. After decoding a hidden message within the lyrics of a song by Jesus and the Brides of Dracula, Sam makes his way to the Griffith Observatory, where he meets the Homeless King, advising that Coyotes are divine beings who should always be followed. He takes Sam to a hidden cave before letting him venture alone into a secret bomb shelter.
Sam makes his way back to Comic-man's house before being notified by the police of his apparent suicide. Sam views the footage from Comic-man's CCTV, and confirms that the presence of the "Owl's Kiss", a homicidal supernatural entity appearing to be a nude woman in an owl mask, was the perpetrator of Comic-man's murder. With his friend, Allen, Sam goes to a chess party hosted by "a cable TV actor" attended by the band members of Jesus and the Brides of Dracula, Sam then follows and attacks the lead singer, Jesus on the toilet, and violently forces him to reveal that only 3 songs on the album are not his but were record label imports, written by someone he calls the Songwriter and likely encrypted. Sam has the Balloon Girl and the two Shooting Stars lead him to the Songwriter, a very old man who reveals that he has encoded many songs with secret messages over the decades. He claims that he wrote most of the songs that Sam grew up with, including Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, which was written in the 1820s. After Sam demands to know who paid him to write those songs, the Songwriter attempts to kill him before Sam beats him to death with an electric guitar.
Sam survives a murder attempt by the Owl's Kiss when he is met by the landlord who has brought a police officer over Sam's last chance of paying the rent. On total impulse, Sam follows a coyote who takes him to another party, where Sam encounters Millicent again, who knows that she has been followed and wants help to solve Jefferson's death. In the titular Silver Lake, Millicent gives Sam a bracelet with a set of chess moves before they are mysteriously shot at by an unknown group of people. Sam is able to survive but Millicent is fatally shot, dying eerily similar to a vintage Playboy magazine cover that Sam owns as memorabilia. The next morning, Sam realizes that the codes on the bracelet are chess moves and using a pull out map from Nintendo Power magazine and the cereal box's back map is able to pinpoint the exact location of the shadow entity's location.
Eventually, Sam finds his way to an off-the-grid location where he finds a man and three women (one of them Troy) in a small hut. As Sam holds them at gunpoint, the man reveals the truth: throughout history, wealthy men such as himself chose to seal themselves in underground "tombs," like the bomb shelter from earlier, much like Egyptian Pharaohs, in order for their souls to "ascend," accompanied by three wives, to an unexplained and unearthly domain. Sarah and her roommates were Jefferson's wives, and their deaths were faked. Their tomb has already been sealed, but Sam speaks with Sarah on the phone, and she confirms that she entered the tomb willingly. At peace with her fate, she and Sam share a brief farewell. Sam drinks the tea the wealthy man offers him and starts passing out when the Homeless King comes by. When he wakes up, he's chained up to a chair over the apparent crime of being in possession of two dog treats, claiming it's to win Sarah back. The Homeless King then lets him go, after telling him that the wealthy man and his three brides have now been taken to their own tomb.
Returning home, Sam has sex with the Bird Woman, a neighbor whose parrot repeats incomprehensible words. From the balcony, Sam watches as his landlord and a police officer enter his apartment to evict him. They notice one of his walls has been painted with the Hobo code symbol for "stay quiet".
In May 2016, A24 acquired U.S distribution rights to the film.[14][15][16] The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 2018. The first country it was released in nationwide was France on August 8, followed by Belgium on August 15.[17]
The film was originally scheduled to be released in the United States on June 22, 2018, but on June 4 was pushed back to December 7, 2018.[18][19] The theatrical release was then pushed back again to April 19, 2019, and three days later it was available to stream.[20][21]
Reception
Critical response
On review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 59% based on 157 reviews, with an average rating of 6.10/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Under the Silver Lake hits its stride slightly more often than it stumbles, but it's hard not to admire - or be drawn in by - writer-director David Robert Mitchell's ambition."[22] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 60 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[23]
Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out gave the film a perfect five rating, calling it "Hypnotic, spiraling and deliriously high" and stating "the ambition of Under the Silver Lake is worth cherishing. It will either evaporate into nothingness or cohere into something you'll want to hug for being so wonderfully weird."[24] Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave a positive review, calling it "a bizarre and outrageous drama grounded in the consistency of Garfield's astonishment at every turn... It's fascinating to watch Mitchell grasp for a bigger picture with the wild ambition of his scruffy protagonist."[25]
Owen Gleiberman of Variety gave a positive review, calling it "a down-the-rabbit-hole movie, at once gripping and baffling, fueled by erotic passion and dread but also by the code-fixated opacity of conspiracy theory. The movie is impeccably shot and staged, with an insanely lush soundtrack that's like Bernard Herrmann-meets-Angelo-Badalamenti-on-opioids."[26] A.A. Dowd of The A.V. Club gave the film a B rating, stating "Mitchell is taking a big swing with his third feature, trying something not just new but also more unconventional, ambitious, and even potentially off-putting."[27]
Emily Yoshida of Vulture stated about the film's message: "I kept coming back to the women in this extremely boy-driven movie—Mitchell suspects that they're all on one big conveyor belt to be chewed up and spit out by Hollywood, or if they're lucky, locked away in the dungeons of the rich and powerful. It's a rather pedestrian imagining for an otherwise admirably cuckoo film—you keep hoping for Mitchell to land on something weirder, more radical."[28] Despite praising Garfield's performance and the film's originality, Bilge Ebiri of The Village Voice gave a negative review, stating: "If you're going to make a postmodern neo-noir sex-conspiracy... set in Los Angeles, it helps to have some personality, or at least a sense of style... Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that's not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement."[29]
Awards
In 2018, the film had positive reactions at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival in Switzerland where it was awarded with the Denis-De-Rougemont Youth Award.[30] At Sitges Film Festival Under the Silver Lake was awarded with the Special Mention of the Jose Luis Guarner Critics' Award.[31]
Cult following
While not initially a box-office success with audiences,[3]Under the SilverLake has garnered a cult following who are convinced that there are hidden meta-clues, codes and ciphers sprinkled throughout the film waiting to be discovered.[32] These include references to the mystery surrounding the identity of the dog killer, various different cyphers or codes, geocoding systems, and even analysis of fireworks in the film, connecting the sound pattern they emit to Morse code.[32] In certain scenes in the film there is graffiti that can be seen in the toilets and on a wall and which are coded with the Copiale cipher. The film's cryptography consultant was computer scientist Kevin Knight, who in 2011 co-created a program to translate the Copiale cipher.[33]
^Knight, Kevin; Megyesi, Beáta; Schaefer, Christiane (June 2011). "The Copiale Cipher". Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: Comparable Corpora and the Web. Portland, Oregon: Association for Computational Linguistics: 2–9.
