Under the Sil­ver Lake – first look review

There’s a famous Nin­ten­do com­put­er game series named Zel­da in which the play­er assumes the role of a lone male adven­tur­er and heads on a tor­tu­ous quest to save a princess. It’s pret­ty stan­dard-issue stuff in terms of its basic start and end point, but along the way it’s a case of gath­er­ing trin­kets, solv­ing puz­zles, destroy­ing mid-game boss­es and descend­ing into dark dungeons.

The games are built around a nar­ra­tive which is itself born from a whim­si­cal fan­ta­sy mythol­o­gy, but the episod­ic nature of the expe­ri­ence means that there is very lit­tle over­ar­ch­ing dra­ma to the process of play­ing. And yet, once you reach the end of the line, there’s some­thing over­whelm­ing­ly sad about the very fact of that hard-fought tri­umph – when dom­i­na­tion ulti­mate­ly leads to depression.

In Under the Sil­ver Lake, David Robert Mitchell’s rois­ter­ing beat­nik noir, East LA is the game­board for Andrew Garfield’s scruffy, stu­pe­fied yo-yo as he tra­vers­es the land­scape in search of his flir­ta­tious neigh­bour, Sarah (Riley Keough), after she goes miss­ing. There’s even a moment where he pulls out a stack of Nin­ten­do Pow­er Mag­a­zine back issues to inves­ti­gate an actu­al Zel­da dun­geon map and synch it up with a to-scale, vin­tage car­toon cere­al box map of Los Ange­les. This is an ambi­tious and sprawl­ing work which mash­es togeth­er the cul­tur­al past and present. It prais­es the inquis­i­tive mind and those who put their lives on hold in delve down the rab­bit hole in search of a high­er truth.

There’s a fun game you can play which involves try­ing to eat a donut with­out lick­ing your lips. Sim­i­lar­ly, it would be hard to write about this movie with­out namecheck­ing the likes of David Lynch, Roman Polan­s­ki (specif­i­cal­ly his Chi­na­town), Paul Thomas Ander­son and the Coen broth­ers. The icon­ic, LA sto­ries by these film­mak­ers are just the sur­face lay­er of inter­laced movie ref­er­ences which seep into the mar­row of this strange movie.

Sam has old Uni­ver­sal mon­ster movie posters adorn­ing his apart­ment walls and is ter­rorised at night by a mur­der­ous owl woman. He dri­ves around, chas­ing clues and spy­ing on sus­pects, all set to a score which riffs on the churn­ing, stab­bing sounds of Bernard Her­mann. The film intro­duces itself up as a ston­er gumshoe saga, but con­stant­ly takes on more elu­sive and abstract forms. There a red her­rings, dead-ends and char­ac­ters who seem impor­tant and are then nev­er seen again. One bizarre meet­ing in an off-the-grid man­sion even sees Mitchell hold­ing his hands up and admit­ting that most of what he’s doing is recy­cled from the greats of yore.

It pos­sess­es a weirdo fond­ness for those clois­tered, para­noiac wingnuts who obsess over crack­pot con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, while also chan­nel­ing a lib­er­al atti­tude towards cre­ativ­i­ty and poet­ic expres­sion. It would be easy to view Sam as some­thing of a blank cipher who is mere­ly con­nect­ing togeth­er Mitchell’s own deliri­ous spec­u­la­tions about worlds inside worlds inside worlds. Yet the the sto­ry all comes togeth­er in way which sug­gests that this has been a jour­ney pow­ered by obscure emo­tions after all, and Garfield makes for a charm­ing tour guide through this light­ly grotesque under­world. In fact, its heart­break­ing finale reframes the entire odyssey as a great break-up/break-down movie, and Sam’s actions are not so much explained as they are rue­ful­ly endorsed.

Where it fal­ters is that the dia­logue is nev­er quite as excit­ing or juicy as the mad­cap plot­ting, and it means that very few of Sam’s many help-meets linger in the mem­o­ry for long. A host of semi-clad female sirens are hap­py to par­ty despite the impos­si­ble dreams of achiev­ing fame, though they all feel like out­lines of char­ac­ters rather than ful­ly fleshed-out beings. Maybe this taps in to the film’s cyn­i­cal under­tow, about how suc­cess is achiev­able not through raw tal­ent, but through break­ing some stu­pid code or blind­ly accept­ing the sub­lime cre­ations of oth­ers. It’s a film which bris­tles with ideas, but you might need to cut it some slack if you’re after cosy res­o­lu­tions and rou­tine profundity.