Under the Silver Lake

The protagonist in David Robert Mitchell's neo-noir film is an unemployed man from Los Angeles who devours pop culture, Sam (Andrew Garfield manages to convincingly extract a sense of eternal boyishness from his character), who would like to do something sensible but, for now, settles for playing Nintendo and masturbating. The mysterious disappearance of an attractive girl from his neighborhood, however, awakens the unflappable Philip Marlowe in him, and his amateur investigation casts an ever-wider net. Sam is guided on the trail of a powerful conspiracy (involving a millionaire, a dog killer and a hit songwriter) by information encoded on old VHS tapes, Hollywood locations, signs on walls, songs and comics. With a dizzying number of allusions, the film can be decoded in many different ways: as a radical criticism of Hollywood in the spirit of #metoo (the realm of white men ensnaring women in their fantasies), as an existential tale about the fact that we ourselves are the source of all mysteries or simply as a fiendishly convoluted and at the same time brilliantly simple work on pop-cultural obsessive-compulsive disorder.