Review of Under the Silver Lake, directed by David Robert Mitchell

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

Because I was on such a limited income during this time, I was really relying on my local library for entertainment. If I had nothing to do, or no blog or freelance work to continue on, I might have actually gone insane. I genuinely cannot imagine what retirement might be like down the road if I have nothing to do.

Anyways, I was going to my local library once a week to pick up movies (in DVD form) and a stack of books to get me through the week. Between this and my advance copy collection, I genuinely got through quite a bit during this time. I was truly on a roll until I had a small depression period over the lack of job.

All of that aside, my local library also provides the streaming service Kanopy, which literally, as this moment, has over seven hundred movies I want to watch. I know for a fact I will never watch all of these movies during my lifetime, but because I have this free time, I made it my mission to whittle down my watch list to a somewhat decent number—maybe like 500.

Under the Silver Lake was one of these movies. I thought it sounded interesting when all of the A24 movies were added in the summer of 2025, and I added it to my watch list. One lonely night, at 12 AM, I pressed play and sat down with it. Was it worth losing sleep over? Maybe not. But I was committed.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

After his neighbor randomly disappears, one man decides to investigate her disappearance himself, leading to some strange encounters.

Our main character in this movie is Sam, who is 33, and I will have to say: I have not seen Andrew Garfield look this ragged before in anything. I was actually impressed at how he physically transformed into a thirty-something-year-old guy who is lost in life and has no motivation. Anyways: Sam lives in Los Angeles and spends his time looking at way too many conspiracy theories.

When he spots his female neighbor without a shirt on, Sam watches with interest, but then one day he discovers he has another neighbor: Sarah (who is more his age and conventionally attractive). As he makes this discovery and has sex, the television drones on about a billionaire missing.

Sarah ends up inviting Sam over to watch television one day, but when they start getting more serious in there, her roommates show up. She asks him to come back the next day, and while he’s on his way back, he spots boys doing something with his car. The next morning, he goes to her place and discovers her roommates and she have moved out.

All that’s left of them is a weird little symbol. He finds a stranger in the apartment and follows them to a party in central Los Angeles, in the downtown area, and he goes up to them. As this happens, the daughter of the billionaire is devastated to learn her father died and leaves. Sam then learns the billionaire was burned to death in a car with three woman, one of whom is probably Sarah.

Sam takes matters into his own hands and visits Comic Fan, who writes a zine that he knows about. Comic Fan seems to know about this symbol and says that it means to hush up or basically something might happen to you. Comic Fan has a theory: Sarah may have disappeared because of the Dog Killer going around and Owl’s Kiss, another murderer who may be supernatural.

Earlier, Sam was given a cookie as a concert ticket, and he goes to the cemetery to see the band from earlier perform. He meets Balloon Girl, who apparently knew Sarah, but the cookie had drugs in it and leaves Sam in a situation where he isn’t in his right mind. Another person remembers Sarah from a part, and Sam. befriends the Homeless King who takes him from the Griffith to tunnels underneath the city.

Comic Fan allegedly commits suicide, but we know that the Owl’s Kiss is connected to his death. Sam takes the cereal box Comic Fan had with the map of Los Angeles, then he meets the band again and forces its lead guy to admit a chunk of their songs were written by someone else. This is the Songwriter, who, after Sam meets him, apparently is behind a lot of popular music.

Sam kills him with Kurt Cobain’s guitar when the Songwriter shoots at him, but then Owl’s Kiss decides to come after Sam too. His landlord, fed up with his lack of rent payments, tells him he has one day to pay. When he goes swimming at the Silver Lake, he meets the billionaire’s daughter again, who gifts him a bracelet identical to Sarah’s. She’s then shot and killed.

Sam looks at the bracelet and realizes there’s a code on it. With the map from the cereal box, he can find a location he’s been looking for. The stranger he’s been chasing, two of her friends, and Troy are there. They give Sam tea and tell him that billionaire’s often try to find three wives and get themselves killed in a tomb because they believe it’ll give them access to a higher plane.

Turns out the billionaire from before, Sarah, and her roommates were the next round of sacrifices. They didn’t die in the car and instead made themselves a tomb. They call Sarah on and she tells Sam she’s fine with what’s about to happen. The Homeless King finds Sam, who is drugged (the tea was spiked) and lets him leave.

Sam goes home and has sex with the topless neighbor from the beginning of the movie. As he’s on their balcony, he watches his landlord and the cop go into his apartment, which has the symbol that was in Sarah’s apartment earlier.

Overall Thoughts

I’ll have to admit: I usually like artistic and eccentric movies, but this one wasn’t doing it for me. I think the fact the main character is kind of insufferable in so many different ways made me really disconnected from this movie in general, and I feel like that I never got into a comfortable rhythm with what was going on plot wise.

There are a lot of twists and turns throughout the movie to keep people on their toes, that’s for sure, but I can see how others, if they’re not closely paying attention, might finds themselves really just confused at what was going on. This isn’t a movie you can put on in the background and expect to understand while half paying attention.

At the same time, if this was meant to feel like one trippy fever dream in so many different ways, then the director and writer succeeded in that. I would never really call a lot of movies bad, and this isn’t one of them.

However, this is definitely for those with a certain taste. If you haven’t watched it already and this interests you, give it a chance. You might like it more than I did!

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