Under the Silver Lake
What’s the story?: A take on the film noir genre, a young man named Sam (Andrew Garfield) follows a string of clues dispersed throughout Los Angeles in the hopes of finding a girl (Riley Keough) who disappeared from his apartment complex.
Under the Silver Lake has a complicated history. The film is the latest from director David Robert Mitchell who helmed the divisive horror feature It Follows in 2014. When Under the Silver Lake premiered at Cannes earlier this year, the reception was cool to hostile for the noir. Home studio A24 immediately moved the feature from its original release date to one in December of this year and did a few reshoots and some cutting before premiering another version of the movie that was met with better, though still middling, treatment. As of this writing the film, which is still listed as playing at AFI Fest, has just left its original December release date and is now being pushed to a summer date.
Whether the film’s quality warrants these release date shifts, the trailer – which hasn’t updated since it dropped earlier this year – leaves many people questioning. On the surface, it’s a take on 1940s noir, but it seems to hew closer to Paul Thomas Anderson’s own trippy noir throwback, Inherent Vice. Both features follow a stoner trying to untangle bizarre clues that might actually mean nothing in the hopes of being reunited with a woman, so your love for Under the Silver Lake might highly depend on whether you enjoyed that film or not. We’ll keep you posted on whether the film actually plays this week or not.