When Sam discovers a mysterious woman named Sarah, who plays in his apartment swimming pool, begins to be stunned because she suddenly disappeared. Sam is a 33-year-old boy who began a search for the girl who suddenly disappeared all over Los Angeles to try to find out the secret of her disappearance. It is a search journey that leads to the mysterious depths of the scandal and conspiracies in Los Angeles.
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.
The pretense of muddling nonsense with intellectual rigor means that it will forever be impossible to consider Under the Silver Lake as anything other than an exercise in smugness from a creative mind that has only the barest grasp on the theses it posits
It's the kind of raggedy-ass thriller that only gets made when a young filmmaker, emboldened by success, moves past virtues of concision, hoping to summon the full, meandering spell of a paranoid dream. Don't hold it against him.
Pretty soon the commentary on how Hollywood uses women as decoration outweighs the fact that Mitchell's just repeating the cycle - albeit with better-than-average outfits.
Under the Silver Lake never finds a reason for being as weird as it is, making for a confusing and frustrating experience despite its hypnotic visuals and great score.
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.
