Movies News Talk
Director David Robert Mitchell's 2019 follow-up to It Follows, Under The Silver Lake, is destined to be a cult classic. For Sam, a slacker conspiracy theorist caught in an odd Los Angeles-based Mystery, it's a dreamlike, disturbing, and finally meaningless trip. Subliminal messages, conspiracies, and cults entwine to imply that Sam's "out there" misgivings are more serious than he thought.
Andrew Garfield plays Sam, a jobless man fixated on secret groups running under the surface of daily life and hidden messages. His life veers dramatically when Riley Keough, his new neighbor, vanishes. Believing her apparent death in a car crash is linked to a more general plot, Sam sets out on a perilous and perplexing search for the truth. Deeper into the Los Angeles underworld, he meets odd people who seem to know something about Sarah's abduction, which helps him to see that his first misgivings were valid.
Sam's research takes him toward the comic book Under the Silver Lake's author, Patrick Fischler. The Comic Fan tells Sam that there is a connection between Sarah's disappearance, a string of dog murders, and the comeback of a homocidal woman sporting an owl mask. Although the Comic Fan first seems to be a common conspiratorial thinker, her discoveries turn out to be accurate. Sam runs upon the band "Jesus and the Brides of Dracula," who he thinks may be embedding secret messages in their songs, at a concert at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Sam encounters many people who seem to know something about Sarah and her companions as his trip unfolds. He discovers a covert underground society and finds that the owl woman killed the Comic Fan. Sam meets the lead singer of the band and orders him to admit that their songs contain subliminal messages directed by an enigmatic person known only as the Songwriter ( Jeremy Bobb). Sam searches for the Songwriter, an old guy claiming to be behind most songs ever produced. He even notes as a fruit of his labor Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, from the early 1800s. Sam kills the Songwriter with an electric guitar after his demands for responses escalate their conflict to violence. Though it's shocking, this disclosure of a century-spanning plot doesn't really provide Sam any meaningful solutions.
Callie Hernandez's Millicent is the daughter of late billionaire Jefferson Sevence, whose death forms the basis of one of Sam's first Conspiracy theories. At first dubious of Sam's ideas, Millicent subsequently turns to him to assist find the truth behind the vanishings of her father and Sarah. Millicent presents Sam a special charm bracelet including chess directions at the Silver Lake Reservoir. They are ambushed before she can explain anything, therefore killing Millicent. Just barely escaping, Sam gets home and discovers the bracelet has a series of chess moves.
Sam finds the dark entity behind all the schemes he has unearthed by means of the coordinates of the bracelet, a Nintendo Power magazine, and a mysterious cereal box. Here Sam's search becomes clearly ridiculous. He connects apparently unconnected bits and everything he needs to find is precisely set out. This emphasizes the main idea of the movie: Sam is building his own intricate puzzle box Mystery while a simpler answer might have been obtained sooner. Sarah is shown to be a member of a cult thinking that a wealthy man restricting himself with three young brides in a tomb will reach spiritual ascension rather than death. In this case, Sarah is Jefferson's wife and she absolutely believes the cult to be legitimate. When Sam discovers this fact, it's too late—Sarah is already entering the grave voluntarily. The subliminal messages Sarah has heard, reflecting Sam's own experiences, persuade her that nothing in the movie points to the accuracy of the cult's ideas.
Sam comes upon a "hobo code" symbol in Sarah's abandoned flat at the start of the movie. He gets an explanation only following the events involving Sarah and the cult. Sam meets the Homeless King (David Yow) following being drugged and confined to a chair by a cult leader. A recurring motif in the movie, Sam's anxiety of housing insecurity is personified in the Homeless King. To Sam, the symbol denotes "stay quiet."
From the start of the movie, Sam has been pulled to his neighbor Bird Woman (Wendy Vanden Heuvel). She strolls around topless with a parrot that yells nonsensical words. Sam leaves the Homeless King and goes home right away having sex with Bird Woman. This behavior exposes Sam's fundamental annoyance. Even discovering a scheme, he finds no gratification. It's a mirror of his actual yearning for a relationship with Sarah, and his behavior results from a lack of satisfaction.
Sam is a slacker who is sloppy and aimless who finds approval by exposing conspiracies. He seeks hidden meanings only he can see since he is not ready to produce something significant in his life. Though he discovers a real Conspiracy, it has nothing to do with him and offers no personal benefit. His life has been committed to an absurd quest; even if it proves to be accurate, it is still as meaningless as if it had been incorrect.
Under Silver Lake is developing a cult following for several reasons. One important consideration is its rewatching value. Like Sam, who explores the rabbit hole more deeply because of the many hints and connections he finds, the movie is full with mysterious signals that spectators still find years later. When it comes to secret messages—including graffiti in a toilet scene penned in a well-known cryptographic cipher—the picture boasts an amazing degree of detail. From the straightforward to the quite sophisticated, fans have proposed innumerable hypotheses, including the one suggesting that the fireworks are communicating in Morse code. Major factors influencing the popularity of the movie also are the script and the ensemble. Andrew Garfield and Riley Keough give unforgettable performances; appearances by performers like Sydney Sweeney in little early-career roles draw fresh spectators. The complex narrative and secret messages guarantee the cult following of the movie will keep expanding despite its box-office problems.