Plot
In the summer of 2011, Sam is an aimless 33-year-old in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, interested in conspiracy theories and hidden messages in popular culture, and uninterested in paying his overdue rent. One morning, Sam sees a news report detailing the disappearance of billionaire Jefferson Sevence. While spying on a topless neighbor feeding her birds he notices a mysterious new neighbor, Sarah. Sarah notices him in turn and later gets high with Sam while watching How to Marry a Millionaire . As they begin to kiss, Sarah's two roommates interrupt and Sarah suggests Sam come back the next day. Fireworks go off nearby as they stand outside Sarah's apartment, and Sam comments that it's a bit late in the summer for them. For a moment Sarah seems transfixed, before giving him a breathless goodbye.
In the morning, Sam discovers that Sarah and her roommates have moved out overnight, and becomes obsessed with learning what happened. He breaks into the empty apartment, finding a strange symbol on the wall, and flees when a woman, Troy, comes by to pick up a box. Sam follows Troy and her two friends to Downtown Los Angeles to a rooftop party, where he meets his friend Allen and Emerald. Emerald points out Sevence's daughter, Millicent, who becomes upset and leaves upon learning of her father's death. He also sees a Balloon Girl doing performance art and talks to one of the "brides" from a band called Jesus & the Brides of Dracula. The bride gives Sam a cookie that doubles as a ticket to a private show at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. On television, Sam discovers that Sevence burned to death in a car with three women. Sarah's hat was found at the scene, and a small dog similar to hers was found dead.
Sam visits the Comic Fan, the author of a zine called Under the Silver Lake. Sam learns that the symbol seen in Sarah's apartment is a Hobo code meaning "stay quiet." The Comic Fan explains that hidden messages are everywhere in modern society. Sarah's disappearance, a mysterious Dog Killer, and the Owl's Kiss - a homicidal supernatural entity appearing to be a nude woman in an owl mask - may all be part of the same conspiracy. He shows Sam a collector's cereal box with a map of Los Angeles on the reverse which he believes holds all the answers.
Sam attends the Jesus & the Brides show at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where the bouncer requires him to take a bite of the admission cookie; Sam eats the whole cookie. At the show Sam is given one of the band's albums and again encounters the Balloon Girl. When he asks her about Sarah she takes him downstairs to the Crypt Club, then ditches him when he becomes sick from the drugged cookie. Attempting to follow the Balloon Girl he spots Troy and gives chase but passes out in front of Janet Gaynor's grave.
After decoding a hidden message within the lyrics of a song by Jesus & the Brides of Dracula, Sam makes his way to the Griffith Observatory. There he is met by the Homeless King, who blindfolds him and takes him to a hidden cave before letting him venture alone into a secret space that resembles a bomb shelter.
Sam makes his way back to the Comic Fan’s house to find police investigating the Fan's apparent suicide. Sam views the footage from the Fan's CCTV, and confirms that the Fan was murdered by the Owl's Kiss. Terrified, he leaves the house, taking the cereal box with him. He phones his friend Allen, who takes him to a chess party attended by the band members of Jesus & the Brides of Dracula. Sam follows Jesus to the bathroom and forces him to reveal that three songs on the album are not his but were record label imports, written by someone Jesus knows only as "the Songwriter." Sam has the Balloon Girl and two Shooting Stars (employees of an escort agency) lead him to the Songwriter, a very old man who reveals that he has encoded many songs with secret messages over the decades. He claims that he wrote most of the music that Sam grew up with, including Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, which was composed in the 1820s. When Sam demands to know who paid him to write the songs, the Songwriter tries to kill him, but Sam beats him to death with an electric guitar.
Sam is rescued from a murder attempt by the Owl's Kiss by the arrival of his landlord with a police officer, who gives Sam one last day to pay the rent. Remembering something the Homeless King had said, Sam follows a coyote which leads him to another party, where Sam encounters Millicent Sevence again. As they swim in the Silver Lake, Millicent gives Sam a bracelet engraved with letters and numbers which she had found in her father's office. While in the water, the two are shot at by persons unknown. Sam survives but Millicent is fatally shot, dying in a pose eerily similar to one on a vintage Playboy magazine cover that Sam owns.
The next morning, Sam realizes that the codes on the bracelet are chess moves. By overlaying the map from the Comic Fan's cereal box on a pull-out map from Nintendo Power magazine he is able to plot the moves and pinpoint the shadow entity's off-the-grid location. Making his way there, he finds a man and three women (one of them Troy) in a small hut. As Sam holds them at gunpoint, the man offers him tea and reveals the truth: throughout history, wealthy men such as himself have chosen to seal themselves in underground tombs, like the "bomb shelter" from earlier, in order for their souls to "ascend," accompanied by three wives, to an unexplained and unearthly domain. Sarah and her roommates were Sevence's wives, and their deaths were faked. Their tomb has already been sealed, but Sam speaks with Sarah on a video phone. She confirms that she entered the tomb willingly and is at peace with her fate, and she and Sam share a brief farewell. As Sam begins to pass out from the (drugged) tea he sees the Homeless King approaching. When he wakes up the Homeless King has him chained to a chair, but finally lets him go, warning him to reveal nothing of what he has learned.
Returning home, Sam has sex with the Topless Bird Woman, whose parrot repeats incomprehensible words. From the Bird Woman's balcony, Sam watches as his landlord and the police officer enter his own apartment to evict him. They notice one of his walls has been painted with the Hobo code symbol for "stay quiet".
Reception
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 59% based on 157 reviews, with an average rating of 6.10/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Under the Silver Lake hits its stride slightly more often than it stumbles, but it's hard not to admire - or be drawn in by - writer-director David Robert Mitchell's ambition." [22] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 60 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". [23]
Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out gave the film a perfect five rating, calling it "Hypnotic, spiraling and deliriously high" and stating "the ambition of Under the Silver Lake is worth cherishing. It will either evaporate into nothingness or cohere into something you'll want to hug for being so wonderfully weird." [24] Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave a positive review, calling it "a bizarre and outrageous drama grounded in the consistency of Garfield's astonishment at every turn... It's fascinating to watch Mitchell grasp for a bigger picture with the wild ambition of his scruffy protagonist." [25]
Owen Gleiberman of Variety gave a positive review, calling it "a down-the-rabbit-hole movie, at once gripping and baffling, fueled by erotic passion and dread but also by the code-fixated opacity of conspiracy theory. The movie is impeccably shot and staged, with an insanely lush soundtrack that's like Bernard Herrmann-meets-Angelo-Badalamenti-on-opioids." [26] A.A. Dowd of The A.V. Club gave the film a B rating, stating "Mitchell is taking a big swing with his third feature, trying something not just new but also more unconventional, ambitious, and even potentially off-putting." [27]
Emily Yoshida of Vulture stated about the film's message: "I kept coming back to the women in this extremely boy-driven movie—Mitchell suspects that they're all on one big conveyor belt to be chewed up and spit out by Hollywood, or if they're lucky, locked away in the dungeons of the rich and powerful. It's a rather pedestrian imagining for an otherwise admirably cuckoo film—you keep hoping for Mitchell to land on something weirder, more radical." [28] Despite praising Garfield's performance and the film's originality, Bilge Ebiri of The Village Voice gave a negative review, stating: "If you're going to make a postmodern neo-noir sex-conspiracy... set in Los Angeles, it helps to have some personality, or at least a sense of style... Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that's not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement." [29]
Cult following
While not initially a box-office success with audiences, [3] Under the SilverLake has garnered a cult following who are convinced that there are hidden meta-clues, codes and ciphers sprinkled throughout the film waiting to be discovered. [32] These include references to the mystery surrounding the identity of the dog killer, various different cyphers or codes, geocoding systems, and even analysis of fireworks in the film, connecting the sound pattern they emit to Morse code. [32] In certain scenes in the film there is graffiti that can be seen in the toilets and on a wall and which are coded with the Copiale cipher. The film's cryptography consultant was computer scientist Kevin Knight, who in 2011 co-created a program to translate the Copiale cipher. [33]
