Under the Silver Lake

The followup film to a sudden indie-success can be a moment of truth. Is a director going to double down on the themes of the first film? Cash in and work on a more commercial project? Or are they going to go for broke and get their dream project made, never mind how comprehensible anybody else finds it? “Under the Silver Lake” is a case of the third option, a LA Noir story of conspiracies, missing women, secrets, failure and discovery, and it’s a case where clearly the director is indulging himself rather a lot. But as indulgences go, this is a fairly intriguing one. I don’t think it holds together as a whole narrative – there’s too many shaggy dog elements here that never really add up to a whole picture – but scene-to-scene this is pretty enjoyable. The general criticism I’ve seen of this is as film that’s gone “full Southland Tales” – but for me, that was a film that actively set up much of its cast to embarrass themselves. This one enjoys itself while disappearing up its own obscurantist fundament. And I enjoyed a reasonable amount of it too, while not entirely being sure this is a film I can easily recommend to a lot of people – it’s self-indulgent but in the right mood, it’s interesting self-indulgence.