With its spectral mood and sinister diagnosis of 21^st century social restlessness, David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows was one of the early success stories of the A24 horror boon. Its atmospheric texture, evoking an oneiric gloss on reality, made it one of the patron saints of the so-called “elevated horror” explosion, which rode a crest of stylistic experimentalism to examine undercurrents of human trauma and dejection. A mere half-decade later, by 2019, elevated horror already felt bloated, no longer an exploratory rebellion against the corporate debasement of ‘00s horror but a codified set of rules and regulations, an examinable, even scientifically replicable, formula and a self-immolating object. Like much of late ‘10s culture, it increasingly felt like an attempt to solidify the status quo in the guise of intervening in it.

Within that context, let no one accuse Mitchell of resting on his laurels with Under the Silver Lake. Rather than extending the genre trappings of It Follows, Mitchell emphasizes its mood of extraordinary ennui and cyclical, ever-gestating confusion, figuring the modern world as a quiet, drawn-out apocalypse, a walking corpse. It recognizes the earlier film’s poetic evocation of suburban detritus set against a backdrop of industrial aimlessness as the real heart beneath the (too obvious) metaphors for sexual transmission. Like its predecessor, Under the Silver Lake is a deeply woozy film, a story about lives running in circles that can only lead to a puzzle never to be solved, and like its predecessor, it positively vibrates with both internal instability and the emptiness of that very energy.

Sam (Andrew Garfield) is a disaffected layabout who spends his days going down the rabbit hole of nearly every conspiracy theory in the book. When he meets Sarah (Riley Keough), a new resident in his apartment complex, he discovers what may be the tiniest semblance of human connection outside the conspiratorial confines of his everyday life. Or maybe she’s just another permutation of the world this aimless, shuffling God of LA’s slacker underbelly already worships: when she goes missing, and Sam’s inability to define himself in any other mode beyond the obsessive finally has a real excuse, it seems like the angels of cinema itself have provided him manna from heaven. It becomes a reason for him to spring into action, and perhaps into suffering, for our entertainment.

Unlike It Follows, which was a piquant pinprick of a film tightening the noose with every shot, Under the Silver Lake begins loosely and only unravels from there. Rather than closing in on you like a killer or latching onto you like a shadow, it moves further and further away from you, not to mention from itself, daring to collapse in on itself as it mushrooms ever outward. This is a frequently daring and often completely confounding work, the paradigmatic “difficult follow-up” to a star-making film. It delights in exposing itself to metaphors it can’t catch. It stands on an astonishingly structurally unsound screenplay whose diffuse textures and scattershot images insist that we acknowledge that internal confusion at every turn.

Under the Silver Lake is, then, a cracked-mirror detective story, one that recalls, by turn, Columbo’s wily, circumstantial, sidewinding ways, Sherlock Jr.’s meta-textual reflections on the limits of film characters surviving the ever-shifting matrices of modernity, and even Clue’s self-amused deconstruction of the idea of a mystery delivered in cinematic form. But in its general malaise, its interest in wandering around in a fugue state, a self-effacing stupor, all while quietly undercutting its own aspirations, it could be best described as The Long Goodbye for the digital generation. The film may go off the proverbial rails, but only because it dares to be filmmaking without rails in the first place.

You could call all this fumbling for stable references and solid comparison points on my part a poor writer’s attempt to make sense of the nonsensical. You could call it a hazard to the reviewer’s health. You could also call it an ego trip, a relatively young filmmaker unduly emboldened by critical acclaim and commercial success completely up his own cloaca, hubristically cutting down filmmaking norms and completely losing the trail of its own idiom. I might be echoing the film’s very mistakes. Or you could indulge the film its fiendishly devilish search for fugitive truth, and travel with it down its own errant path. Which is to say that Under the Silver Lake is a story where the periphery matters more than its void of a center. It spends most of its time spinning its wheels, existing much as Sam does: busily vacant, begging for criticism, embroiled in a divine farrago that is impossible to overcome. Like Sam, Mitchell’s film is certainly not incurious, but, also like Sam, it’s also self-evidently (self-congratulatorily? Self-effacingly? Self-mockingly?) bullshit.

Which, in the context of Mitchell’s screenplay, is entirely apt. Under the Silver Lake is a cryptid of a film, an object endlessly permissive to the shifting matrices of its own imagination, a film that dares us to recognize how dubious its own ego really is. It butts its head up against things it recognizes as implacable forces that, try as one might, simply cannot be comprehended. It plays like a nasty-minded parody of what Frederic Jameson called the “conspiratorial” mode of much modern thinking, where media recognizes that our experienced reality is controlled by forces far beyond our comprehension only to stop attempts to inquire into these forces at convenient limits. Rather than a complex tangle of diffuse entities working both in tandem and at cross purposes, we get easy narratives of individual culprits, definable plots, nameable master-hands pulling the string.

Under the Silver Lake is a film about how right Jameson was, how dubious it looks when you reduce your imagination to understanding certain forms of control in a way that actually limits your ability to grasp how deeply we are controlled in the first place. It all feels not only maladroit but nihilistic in the extreme, not to mention essentially demented, the mindlessly self-obsessed ramblings of a confused film unaware of its own limits. But Silver Lake is so self-consciously opaque in its tone, so oblique in its anti-mythology, that it feels less like a failure of capacity than a success of depraved imagination. From beginning to end, Under the Silver Lake conducts a thoroughly alienating audit of itself, and of us, by exploring the outermost regions of its own narrative possibility until it breaks into pieces and devours its viewers in the process.

Score: 8/10