David Robert Mitchell:
Under the Silver Lake (2018)
The third film from the director of the great
It Follows (2014), UtSL tells the story of Sam, an aimless yet smart slacker who one night encounters a beautiful girl swimming in the pool of the apartment complex they both live in. Sam, instantly smitten talks to the girl, and they end up spending the evening together getting stoned and watching films together, until it's time for Sam to leave. The next afternoon when Sam goes over to her apartment, she and all her belongings have mysteriously disappeared, and his determination to find her again sends Sam down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, weird characters, even weirder parties and just general strangeness. Oh, and there's also some reprehensible nut job on the loose murdering dogs, for some reason.
First things first. At two hours and twenty minutes there's definitely some fat in the film that could have been trimmed, in my opinion. Or maybe it was just my mistake to start watching this at two in the morning. Anyway, this is not a fast paced film. Some have likened this to David Lynch's films, and while I kind of somewhat agree (one sequence in particular with a female singer, red curtains and white marble statues seems awfully familiar..), Mitchell is no Lynch. Then again, no one other than the man himself is, so that's not to say Mitchell doesn't have talent. On the whole I preferred It Follows to this, but this is a film that needs significantly more time to digest, and possibly a rewatch before I can fully make up my mind about it. I guess if it's goal was to intrigue and make me think about it after watching it, the film served it's purpose.
