Film

Under the Silver Lake

Name: Under the Silver Lake
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
Released: 2018
Cast: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace, Callie Hernandez, Don McManus

Missing-person mystery
Strange

A young drifter obsesses over a woman's disappearance in LA, unspooling conspiracy theories and urban legends in a surreal, paranoid odyssey. It's deliberately frustrating: oblique, maximalist, operating by its own logic. For viewers who prize atmosphere and genuine weirdness over explanation.

TMDb rating

3.2

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love shaggy, looping noir where the pleasure is in following a restless hunch through a city full of odd details, and you don't mind if the puzzle never quite resolves into a tidy answer.

Skip it if you want a mystery that plays fair and clicks shut, because this one drifts, digresses and piles on symbols until the search itself becomes the point rather than the solution.

What it asks of you: Settle in for just over two and a half hours of wandering, with a slow build, a sprawling middle and a tone that shifts between sly comedy and unease.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Mulholland Drive2001

A fractured descent through Los Angeles mythology and female vanishing, by a director also comfortable with mystery that resists neat answers. Visually hypnotic and architecturally strange.

But Three hours of dream logic. The film doesn't conclude so much as fold in on itself, which is exhilarating or maddening depending on your patience.

Inherent Vice2014

Another searcher in LA, another mystery that gets weirder instead of clearer, another 1970s male protagonist losing the thread. Paranoid, funny, genuinely affectionate toward its own bewilderment.

But Paul Thomas Anderson loves digression. If you came for plot momentum, you'll feel like you're wading through caramel.

Brick2006

High school noir where a detective searches for his vanished ex-girlfriend. It has actual plot resolution, but it earns mystery through style and commitment to its own rules rather than clarity.

But Self-consciously artificial dialogue. The affectation is the point, but if it doesn't work for you immediately, nothing else will.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Under the Silver Lake

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Synecdoche, New York2008

Both ask what happens when pattern-finding becomes pathology. Both suggest the searcher might be constructing the mystery rather than uncovering it. Both are maximalist about misery.

A man constructs an increasingly baroque and recursive world that mirrors his interior collapse. Like Under the Silver Lake, it's a maze that might just be madness, where the obsession has consumed the searcher entirely.

But Dense philosophical filmmaking. Deliberately exhausting and claustrophobic. Some find Kaufman's register too self-serious for its own good.

The Long Goodbye1973

Altman's shaggy, meandering take on Chandler. Barely a crime film, mostly an anthropological study of a detective adrift in a world that's moved on without him.

But Disarmingly unmotivated. The plot ambles. You have to be seduced by the atmosphere and the peripheral characters, not the forward momentum.

A Ghost Story2017

A protagonist obsessed with presence and absence, haunted by what remains. Minimal, poetic, genuinely unnerving about the spaces between people and time.

But It's a grief film wearing a ghost costume. Slow, small, and if metaphor reads as pretension to you, this won't convert you.

Memories of Murder2003

A serial killer mystery that deliberately denies closure. Beautiful, aching examination of obsession, uncertainty, and what happens when investigation has no answer.

But The ending is deliberately frustrating. If you watch a mystery film to have the mystery solved, this will feel like a cheat.

Pierrot le Fou1965

A man spirals into obsession and strangeness alongside a mysterious woman. Godard in full formal revolt: painterly, digressive, operatic. Pure cinema as mood and visual idea.

But No conventional narrative. Subtitled. Assumes you want to feel the film rather than understand its plot.

The Zero Theorem2013

A isolated man in LA solving obsessive puzzles that might mean nothing, the city pressing in with strangeness and alienation. Gilliam at his most surreal and sincere.

But Visually overstuffed to the point of exhaustion. Some viewers find Gilliam's aesthetic claustrophobic rather than immersive.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang2005

An actor turned detective searching through LA corruption and lies. Funny, self-aware, with real melancholy underneath. The mystery doesn't solve the loneliness.

But Tonal shifts between comedy and darkness. Sarcasm-forward. If you need your genre films to pick one mood and stick with it, this restlessness will jar you.