Metacritic score: 57
Under the Silver Lake
The gleefully paranoid neo-noir is in theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson covered film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.
A twisted postmodern neo-noir that’s set in contemporary Los Angeles but folds itself back onto classic Hollywood tropes, Under the Silver Lake — from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell — garnered very mixed reviews at its Cannes debut in 2018. (I loved it, despite its flaws.) Starring Andrew Garfield as a hapless, aimless hipster who finds himself investigating the disappearance of a Marilyn Monroe–styled girl next door (played by Riley Keough), it’s blatantly knowing in how it recycles the tropes that Hollywood has pressed upon its women characters.
But it also poses the possibility that pop culture is all recycling anyhow, and there might not be any way around that. It’s cheerily pessimistic and imaginative, and you’ll either love it or hate it — but you won’t want to miss it.
