Under the Silver Lake and Our Hunger for Hidden Meaning

There’s a particular kind of restlessness that shows up standing in a checkout line, or flipping through channels out of boredom — a suspicion that the glossy surface of things is covering something else, that your own unremarkable life might be a background detail in a plot you were never handed the password to. Under the Silver Lake takes that low-grade paranoia and builds an entire film around it, starting as a shaggy noir about a missing woman and ending as something closer to an indictment of everyone watching, ourselves included.

Sam, the film’s unemployed and directionless protagonist, is behind on rent and days from losing his apartment, but the crisis he chooses to solve isn’t the one actually threatening him. Instead of finding work, he goes looking for meaning in the debris of Los Angeles — the specific, telling choice a person makes when the real problem in front of them feels too dull, or too hopeless, to face head-on. The inciting incident is almost embarrassingly small: a night spent with a neighbor named Sarah, who vanishes the next morning and leaves behind an empty apartment and one strange symbol scratched into a wall. Sam doesn’t chase her out of love so much as out of need — proof, any proof, that his life connects to something larger than rent due dates and empty afternoons. That need pulls him into a private mythology built from old comic books, cereal-box codes, and pirate radio broadcasts, all of it assembled around the conviction that the powerful are leaving clues meant only for people sharp enough, or desperate enough, to notice them.

The film understands something true about how conspiracy thinking actually works: it isn’t primarily about evidence. It’s about the relief of feeling seen by a universe that otherwise seems indifferent. Believing a symbol on a wall was left for you is, in its way, kinder than believing nothing was left for you at all. Sam’s descent plays less like a detective story than a portrait of a mind that would rather be the target of a vast conspiracy than the anonymous casualty of an indifferent city.

That idea reaches its bluntest expression in the film’s confrontation with an aging songwriter, living in quiet comfort, who calmly tells Sam that he is the uncredited author behind decades of music people mistook for their own rebellion — that the songs which felt like a generation’s private awakening were manufactured, tested, and sold back to them like any other product. It’s a cruel scene precisely because it doesn’t feel implausible. Culture is an industry before it’s anything else, and the real provocation isn’t the twist so much as the discomfort of recognizing how much of our inner life we’ve outsourced to things built to be sold to us.

By the time the mystery resolves, or fails to, Under the Silver Lake has made its case without needing to state it outright: the hunger for hidden meaning says less about what’s actually hidden than about how unbearable it feels to suspect that nothing is.

The film piles on texture to make its case, layering in a killer preying on neighborhood dogs, a comic book that seems to be narrating Sam’s own life back to him, a code hidden inside a cereal box, and a homeless man holding forth on conspiracies to anyone who’ll listen — each thread a fresh temptation to believe the city is arranged specifically around Sam’s ability to decode it. None of these threads resolve cleanly, and that’s clearly deliberate: a mystery that actually explained itself would undercut the point, since the appeal of conspiracy was never really about getting an answer. It was about the search itself feeling like it mattered.

Real criticism has followed the film for how it treats its women, too, and it deserves more than a shrug. Sarah, and most of the other female characters Sam encounters, function primarily as clues, props, or objects of a gaze the film never quite steps outside of, even while it seems to be diagnosing that same gaze as part of Sam’s problem. Whether the movie critiques that impulse or simply indulges it stayed a genuine split among people who watched it closely, and nothing in the film cleanly settles the question. That’s a real weakness, or at minimum a real tension, in a movie otherwise built around exposing exactly this kind of self-serving male narrative.

It helps to remember this is the same director who made It Follows, a film that found dread in ordinary suburban streets without needing any of it to be supernatural in a way that could be proven. David Robert Mitchell seems to specialize in atmospheres where the threat might be entirely imagined and might be entirely real, and refuses to say which, because for the person living inside that atmosphere the distinction stops mattering. Under the Silver Lake takes that same refusal and points it at a specific kind of modern loneliness — the one that would rather be targeted by something enormous than overlooked by everything.