Why was A24’s ‘Under the Silver Lake’ so hated?
Thanks to a steady stream of acclaimed releases, A24 has become both a marketable brand and a byword for quality, but no production company boasts a 100% success rate. Admittedly, it depends entirely on who you ask, but Under the Silver Lake is either one of the worst films in the production company’s roster or an unfairly overlooked gem.
Writer and director David Robert Mitchell burst onto the scene with his second feature, the ingenious supernatural stalker It Follows, but it would be another four years before his follow-up arrived. When it did, the filmmaker’s off-kilter and often impenetrable hybrid of surrealism, noir, black comedy, and murder mystery generated almost every reaction possible.
It sounds both counterintuitive and oxymoronic, but Under the Silver Lake is a movie that’s difficult to like and easy to love. Those who couldn’t agree with its tone were left scratching their heads, while those willing to embrace Mitchell’s singular vision discovered a curio they would obsess over for days, weeks, months, and even years to come.
In the broadest sense, the story follows Andrew Garfield’s Sam, who catches a glimpse of Riley Keough’s enigmatic Sarah. When she disappears, he takes it upon himself to use his own interest in subliminal messaging, hidden codes, and conspiracy theories to try and unravel the mystery of her vanishing. Doing so draws him deeper and deeper into the sordid, seedy, and outlandish underbelly of Los Angeles.
It’s undoubtedly ambitious, but that’s one of the major reasons why the people who don’t like Under the Silver Lake tend to despise it with such a burning passion. It’s overlong, unwieldy, regularly convoluted, and doesn’t resolve many of its meandering plot points to a satisfactory degree. On the other hand, though, that’s kind of the point.
Garfield’s character is a jobbing actor, a pop culture obsessive, short on cash, low on ambition, and dry on prospects, who uses a borderline parasocial bond as a way to keep himself occupied. It’s a caricature of the chronically online and media-dependent, which could be construed as Under the Silver Lake actively mocking its target audience in a self-reflexive and subversive way. He’s a walking cliché, a bit of a creep, dangerously obsessive, and lacking in any sort of tangible sense of individualism.
If the viewer can’t get on board with a protagonist like that, then they’re sure as shit not going to be interested in following their 139-minute odyssey that incorporates canine murders, the dark side of Hollywood, the cult of celebrity, subliminal hints of things to come and those that have already transpired, and a topless bird woman. There’s a lot going on, and first glance a lot of it doesn’t make a lick of sense, with one baffling scene leading directly into the next over the course of its entire running time.
It would be a rampant generalisation to say the reason Under the Silver Lake is so hated is because folks didn’t get it, but it’s kind of accurate at the same time. The cult of devotion that’s built up around it has been created by those who invested into its many mysteries and sought to unpack them, but if anybody wasn’t hooked by the first act, then the rest of the movie is a never-ending procession of confusion.
