Noirvember Week 2: Under The Silver Lake

Under the Silver Lake is a strange creature, the kind that slinks out of shadows at midnight and leaves you wondering if you saw it at all. It’s got that L.A. sparkle on the surface, but underneath, it’s a twisted labyrinth of conspiracy, buried secrets, and faces hiding behind masks.

Andrew Garfield plays Sam, an out-of-work nobody, and he’s as cracked as the Hollywood sidewalks he treads. He drifts through the city with a hangover and a half-smile, chasing down a girl who vanishes without a trace. But this isn’t your typical missing-persons case—it’s a rabbit hole into the rotten core of Los Angeles, where every clue is a piece of a twisted puzzle that might never fit together.

The movie is a love letter to noir, but not the kind with trench coats and fedoras. This one’s a hallucinatory trip through L.A.'s neon-lit underbelly, full of dead-end roads and cul-de-sacs that whisper secrets to the ones willing to listen. David Robert Mitchell directs with a fever dream logic, twisting the city’s landmarks into something menacing and surreal, like a postcard dipped in gasoline.

Under the Silver Lake is for the kind of folks who don’t mind walking down dark alleys without knowing where they lead, who get that sometimes the mystery is the point, not the solution. It’s an echo of those old detective stories, but this time, the villain is the city itself—half-glamour, half-decay. In the end, you might feel lost, but that’s exactly where this film wants you. And in the City of Angels, sometimes lost is the only way to be found.