David Robert Mitchell's 2014 low-budget horror It Follows was a huge hit, making the most of a nightmarish thought about sexual transmission.
Under the Silver Lake, however, is a mare's nest, yet another paranoid film about Hollywood itself, deeply in debt to David Lynch.
Andrew Garfield plays Sam, a stoner somehow living in a hipster neighbourhood in LA, without a job but with an apartment and a car he can't pay for. When he's not spying on women, he spends his time pursuing arcane mysteries and he is fascinated by mysterious goings in the district, including the disappearance of a local mogul, inexplicable dog-killings, and the crackpot theories of a comic-book writer.
He falls for a beautiful young woman next door, Sarah (Riley Keough), who walks around in a white bikini with her little dog and spends an evening with her. But the next day she has disappeared and her apartment has been emptied.
So Sam sets off on an occult quest to find out what has happened to her, following hidden messages in lyrics and a secret map in a cereal box, eventually uncovering a vast conspiracy and a preposterous explanation of what has happened to Sarah. A cult pursues eternal life by sealing the enormously rich in chambers deep beneath Silver Lake with willing girls. Of course.
So this is the Hollywood dream consuming its dreamers once more. There's a good scene when Sam breaks into the mansion of a fabulously rich songwriter who jeeringly tells him that actually he wrote all of the pop culture Sam cares so much about and "it's all silly and it's all meaningless", a thought Sam finds so intolerable he explodes into violence. Otherwise, this is a tiresomely self-regarding story that not even Garfield's allure can enliven.
Hollywood eats itself. Again.
