Under the Silver Lake (2018)

If David Lynch would have made a hippie movie... it would've probably been called "Under the Silver Lake". Or maybe David Lynch made a hippie movie, but I can't really remember any right now (a really hippie one). What we have here is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, whose "It Follows" I counted a couple years ago in the probably best horrors ever made. Not the case here. Not a horror... neither a best ever made..

A jobless guy without much of a perspective, outside being evicted due to late rent, finds something to kill his time by solving the puzzle of Silver Lake - an area in East L.A. apparently known for its hipster trend (at least Google says that). The enigma starts with a blonde girl living across the door who disappears over night. The chain of investigations gets us through various locations, with even more various characters - from a dog killer, to a paranoid graphic novels author obsessed of the urban legend of a killer nymph with an owl head, an eccentric millionaire disappeared in strange conditions and (spoiler) found in even more suspicious conditions, a composer who since a century ago embeds subliminal messages into all hits released on this planet, and others.

There are many parts in the movie that don't make any sense. At least not an obvious one, and not raising to a level that could intrigue you enough to search for one. I think I've seen some comments somewhere telling that it doesn't seem to have an end. I think it has, at least for the intrigue where it starts from. I don't know how satisfactory that might seem for some, but for me it was ok. What's after is just an epilogue. The reason though to watch the movie is, by far, the way it's visually composed. It's so good that the subject fades away. I don't even know how to describe it from that perspective. The trailer isn't really the best indicator. Let's just say it's very divers as camera work. Which anyway, you should see, not read about... ;)

Rating: 3.5 out of 5