dir. David Robert Mitchell. Recommended.

I got sick of movies for a while in 2019 by slamming the A24 back catalogue trying to establish a clear idea of what “an A24 movie” is. There are a ton of bad ones, and they get worse when you become overly-aware of the A24ish ways they’re bad together. While Moonlight is the clearest instance of what “the A24 form” seeks to and can sometimes achieve, Under the Silver Lake most completely epitomizes “A24 movie” as a form in itself. If you want to watch just one movie to contextualize and frame Midsommar, First Reformed, The Florida Project, The Lobster, Eighth Grade, Swiss Army Man, The End of the Tour, The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers, Life After Beth, and about 60 other “quirky” but formally very similar movies from the last decade, here’s your rosetta stone.

There’s a lot to dislike about Under the Silver Lake, but as a distant, agnostic viewer who loves when obsessive craft meets ramshackle chaotic-weird, I loved it. The basic plot is, an unlikeable loser “fail son” in LA gets involved in a Rube Goldberg conspiracy/mystery (basically because he’s bored slash trying to get laid), and the conspiracy/mystery spirals into further and further fields of ridiculousness that are ultimately never resolved.

The movie is absolutely jammed with meta-tactics to encourage and cultivate a conspiratorial reddit-sleuthing viewing and interaction – for instance tons of stuff appears in the movie in literal code that requires internet community detection – but in the end none of this stuff is essential or really matters to the movie itself, even if it is there for the very-online people who want to engage with it – an audience the movie seems to slyly but clearly equate with its “fail son” main character. In this way the movie is about a kind of person it’s also directly addressing, and a critique of behavior that it’s also actively encouraging: this feels formally novel and highly contemporary to me, to the point of being shocking, considering its resonance with the ways fucked-up online slime pits like 4ch*n or q*non manifest irl. If you want to watch a movie “about” how an internet-diseased 24 year old Anthony Comello could end up irl gunning down a “gambino family” crime boss, here it is, this is the movie.

Under the Silver Lake is also encyclopedic in its references to every piece of LA noir that came before it – almost every shot functions as non-stop nerdy homage to some other movie. This restless self-awareness, nakedly wrestling with pre-internet influence-worship, while trying to synthesize exactly that influence to tell a contemporary for-the-internet story, in digital instagram color, while also fully anticipating and working any kind of expected critique or viewing back into the movie: These are the calling cards of “A24 movie.”

I personally don’t care about “interpreting clues,” “fan theories,” “getting the references,” or “canons,” so it seems possible that the extent to which I enjoyed this movie may have had to do with the extent to which I wasn’t in its crosshairs; also the extent to which I can maintain safe distance while watching a movie about an asshole. (If you are the movie’s target, or if you can’t or don’t want to maintain such a distance, I certainly don’t have any judgment of that, but would worry that you’ll find this movie to be annoying or trolling.) I love an ambiguous sprawl of a movie, with a lot of characters, environments, ideas, modes, images, and tones – I wish there were more messy maximalist movies that override and melt narrative, making a soup that becomes something else entirely, unafraid of being gross. In this sense this movie is clearly kin with the likes of Southland Tales (2006), the LA movie I feel it would double feature with best.

This is the second movie by the guy who made It Follows, itself also “a good A24 movie” and a movie that I like, but which is dollhouse-sized by comparison. Can’t wait to watch whatever his next one is.