Delayed Reaction: Under the Silver Lake

The Pitch: Los Angeles is a weird place...but what if it was weirder?

A listless man accidentally untangles a massive conspiracy in the L.A. underworld while trying to find a girl he met who mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night.

Filmmakers love a weird Los Angeles story. It makes sense. Most of them live there. It's a very large city geographically, with a population spread out into many different neighborhoods. The fact that its central industry is film and television production attracts a lot of big and strange personalities, and it grew dramatically in size over a relatively short period of time. Filmakers have had a surprising amount of luck creatively with showing the stranger side of L.A. When David Lynch brought his particular sensibilities to L.A., people called the movie - Mulholland Drive - a masterpiece (Other people, not me). The Coen Brothers' most casually popular movie takes place in the bizarre world of The Big Lebowski. PTA took a stab at it with Inherent Vice: a polarizing but effective comedy. The Nice Guys (weird 1970s L.A.) is one of my favorite movies of the decade.

Here's an important fact though. Those movies don't work because they're weird. That appears to be the big misunderstanding that Under the Silver Lake has. It's David Robert Mitchell's follow up to the surprise horror hit, It Follows, and he takes a massive swing with this one. It's long (they cut it down to 2h20m). It's packed with familiar actors, sometimes in very small parts. It's sprawling: Andrew Garfield goes to many neighborhoods and uncovers a large portion of the underworld. The problem is that the movie tries to make the weirdness the appeal of the movie. The story (not to be confused with the mystery) isn't that interesting. There isn't much about Andrew Garfield's Sam to root for. He sort of just exists. The humor doesn't really work. It has the problem that a lot of projects with surrealist elements do. It thinks that just because something is surreal (exceedingly odd or inexplicable), it's also funny.

If this movie was about 20% worse, it would be in "so bad that it's good" territory. I watched it until the very end thinking these was some magic last twist that would make the movie brilliant. It's so confidently strange that I want to believe the director knew what he was doing. Ultimately, it was too damn ambitious for its own good.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend