Under the Silver Lake (15)
Falling somewhere between the maddening brilliance of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice and the staggering badness of Richard Kelly’s cult wannabe Southland Tales, David Robert Mitchell’s It
Follows follow-up is the sort of selfconsciously indulgent meta-movie that elates and infuriates in almost equal measure. Set in the hipster LA neighbourhood that provides the movie with the second half of its title, it’s a neo-noir detective story, steeped in the mythos of old Hollywood, yet constructed from the sometimeskitschy/sometimes cool pop culture ephemera that has defined the life of its deadbeat protagonist, trapping him an adolescent purgatory where everything feels like a scene from a film. This is Andrew Garfield’s Sam, a tousle-haired slacker who becomes obsessed with his beautiful neighbour (Riley Keough), who moves out of her apartment in the middle of the night shortly after he meets her. Sam becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her, convincing himself that her abrupt departure is tied up with the disappearance of a billionaire philanthropist, a spate of canine killings, underground bunkers, end-of-the-world cults and the rise of a Jesus-themed rock band. Infusing the shaggy-dog plotting with an undercurrent of conspiracy theory madness, the film offers a surprisingly bleak critique of the failings of Generation X, the selfdefining slacker generation of which Mitchell is himself a part (he was born in the mid-1970s) and who now find themselves caught between the capitalist-minded hippy sellouts of the 1960s and the technocratic millennials who have thoroughly usurped them. ■