Everybody loves a twisty paranoid thriller. The ‘70s embraced gritty conspiracy stories like Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Soylent Green (1973), while contemporary movies like Watcher (2022) and Coherence (2013) bring intriguing new ideas to the genre. Although the bulk of this subgenre leans toward serious drama and mind-bending mystery, some paranoid thrillers make the bold choice to satirize its time-tested tropes instead.
David Robert Mitchell (who made his mark with the psychological horror It Follows) does just that in his critically divisive, surrealist black comedy, Under the Silver Lake (2018), which you must check out before it leaves Netflix next week on July 5.
Under the Silver Lake pokes fun at the obsessive puzzle-solving tendencies of Sam (Andrew Garfield), an aimless 30-something who involves himself in a bizarre conspiracy that unfolds in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Despite being days away from being evicted, Sam is more preoccupied with dubious codes, unlikely treasure maps, and flimsy coincidence — anything that his conspiracy-addled brain can make sense of.
After flirting with his neighbor Sarah (Riley Keough), who disappears around the same time as billionaire Jefferson Sevence (Chris Gann), Sam embarks on a quest with no end in sight. Determined to find out what happened to Sarah, Sam attempts to expose Hollywood’s seedy underbelly, convinced that interconnected subliminal messages lie in plain sight. As Sam races from one unlikely location to the next, we’re left to wonder whether his hyperfixations have any basis in reality, or if they’re simply the product of an idle, disillusioned mind.
Mitchell’s neo-noir satire shares thematic DNA with Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt (2022), which blends cosmic horror with the claustrophobic journey of two men who fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole. This Benson and Moorhead joint is darkly humorous and deeply emotional at once, mapping the madness of connecting exceedingly random dots for the sake of solving a heady mystery. While also satirical, Something in the Dirt offers grounded commentary on shared delusion, which is often caused by extreme isolation or personal trauma.
By contrast, Under the Silver Lake is more incoherent and absurdist, playfully mimicking the oddball aspects of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001) to further its down-the-rabbit-hole premise. Whenever Sam engages in pretentious conversation with the zine author Comic Fan (Patrick Fischler) or decodes maps on cereal boxes to find the next big clue, the film makes unsubtle winks at Sam’s ridiculous shenanigans and the vapid compulsions that fuel him.
Most criticisms aimed at Under the Silver Lake have to do with Sam’s long, meaningless journey, which might feel a tad indulgent at times. While there’s a conversation to be had about a film as obtuse and meandering as the subject it is satirizing, Mitchell’s clever use of pop culture references to create a faux-conspiracy lends the film its witty, subversive quality. We see Sam scour through old Playboy issues and Nintendo Power magazines to solve mathematical equations and pinpoint exact coordinates, all of which fit to form an incoherent pattern only he can understand. Although the viewer sees his search as a futile one, every tongue-in-cheek reference makes sense within the context of Sam’s increasingly paranoid view of the world.
Beneath Sam’s attempts to escape his circumstances lies an existential crisis. He’s trying to force meaning onto a mystery when there is none as a way to make sense of his own life. Mitchell rightfully lampoons the urge to ignore reality in favor of ludicrous conspiracies, but Sam’s journey also ends with the realization that the absence of straightforward answers is the point. There is no grand mystery to solve here, no logical end to a conspiracy story that is supposed to be unsatisfying.
The aimless nature of Under the Silver Lake isn’t novel — Mitchell borrows from the “wandering protagonist” trope of jaded or burnt-out private detectives, like the ones in The Long Goodbye (1973) or Inherent Vice (2014). Instead of treating the central mystery as a convoluted puzzle that should be taken at face value, Under the Silver Lake revamps these familiar tropes into a story that is uniquely suited to our hyper-capitalist world.
Sam might be hell-bent on getting difficult answers in Under the Silver Lake, but he remains oblivious to his glaring flaws and ingrained misogyny. Mitchell uses this hypocrisy to weave in some compelling commentary about out-of-touch nihilism without turning Sam into a caricature. After all, it’s tempting (and incredibly human) for someone like Sam to lose himself in a world of grandiose make-believe instead of facing a sad, painful reality of his own making.
Nearly a decade later, Under the Silver Lake feels even more relevant than it did in 2018. In an era where every pop-culture obsessive is racing to decode hidden clues, connect impossible dots, and turn every coincidence into evidence, Mitchell’s film feels less like a tangled mystery and more like a somber warning. Whether you see it as a brilliant satire or an indulgent mess, Under the Silver Lake is a movie that’s difficult to stop thinking about — and that’s more than most conspiracy thrillers can claim. That is also why it’s worth watching on Netflix before it disappears on July 5.
Under the Silver Lake is currently streaming on Netflix.