Under the Silver Lake (3½ Stars)

Conspiracy theories! I love them! It's not that I believe them, I just find them fascinating. It's beautiful the way random facts can be linked together to create a new truth. Just to take one example, the theory that the Moon landing was faked. Clues are strung together from Stan Kubrick's films which are supposed to be a confession that he created the Moon landing in a film studio. Of course, it's nonsensical for anyone to say "I believe the conspiracy theory that <fill-in-the-blank>". As soon as you believe something, you no longer call it a conspiracy theory, you call it a fact.

That's what "Under the Silver Lake" is about. A young man called Sam who lives in Hollywood observes things happening around him. The richest man in Los Angeles has gone missing. Dogs are being killed. His neighbour moves out of her apartment overnight, after she's seen with a man dressed as a pirate. He thinks they're connected, and his investigations lead him into contact with a comic book writer who's a walking encyclopaedia of Los Angeles conspiracy theories; except he doesn't call them conspiracy theories, he calls them facts. A woman who's naked apart from a bird mask has been killing men for hundreds of years. A free gift in a cereal packet is a map of secret locations in Los Angeles. A new pop group, Jesus and the Brides of Dracula, has been putting secret messages in their songs. There's a secret society, an elite in Los Angeles, that can read the messages. Everyone else is blissfully ignorant.

When I watched the film the first time I gave it a high rating. It doesn't seem so good the second time round. What I like is the atmosphere and the mystery. When the mystery is unravelled, the explanations are so absurd that I can't accept them. I don't want to go into them, except to say that the explanations are more absurd than the theories themselves. Let me give a parallel: In the case of the faked Moon landing, someone finds out that Stanley Kubrick was hired to make the film by inhabitants of the Moon who wanted to remain secret. That's a similar level of insanity.

On the other hand, I've read film reviews that claim that the final scenes aren't really happening. Sam is so obsessed with his conspiracy theories that he imagines things that justify them. In general, I reject film interpretations that claim everything is imagined or dreamt or the visions of a psychotic breakdown. In this case it makes better sense than accepting the final scenes at face value. Did Sam kill the neighbour that he thought had moved out? Anything is possible in a film like this.

Success Rate:  - 3.9

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