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I am in a coffee shop in Silver Lake currently. The double espresso I drank cost three dollars and fifty cents.

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There are six people in here with me, as well as three employees.

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Everyone’s on their computers these days. Or looking at their smart phones. We all consume media that says it’s meant for us. But what’s the real point of media and advertisements? What’s under the blatant layer of subliminal messaging? We all see things that are designed to be decoded, just so we can miss the separate hidden codes underneath.

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Codes. Messages. Conspiracy theories. Hidden meanings.

It’s all a little nonsensical, isn’t it?

Maybe just the younger generation desperately looking for some purpose. We want to think that there’s some deeper meaning behind why we’re all being screwed over. We want the ultra rich to be the super villains we make them out to be. We want to be important.

But you know what I want?

A movie where the main character is likable, understandable, and has clear motivations. Unfortunately that’s just not the case with Under the Silver Lake.

Not to say that every protagonist has to be the same, but in a movie filled with hidden messages and weirdness and a fairly incoherent plot, it would be nice to have something to latch onto. Without that, an emotional experience is lost.

This is an impossible movie to review. And that’s why I decided to review it.

The simple issue is this: every theory you have after seeing this movie is correct. Like:

Sam is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Sam is the dog killer.

Sam is a mythological being.

Sam is the hero inside the comic book “under the silver lake”.

They are all true.

There’s just too much stuff inside this movie. Too many ways to interpret the events. And thus, the actual act of interpretation becomes meaningless.

And that may be the point. This movie could be overstuffed by design. It’s a way to display how overcomplicated our world is.

But, what I found about this movie is: the more I thought about it, the less I liked it.

For example: there’s a moment when Sam goes to the Silver Lake reservoir with the rich daughter of the man he believes was killed. They go skinny dipping and she gives him a clue to the conspiracy. Then she’s shot and killed and accidentally recreates the pose that was on Sam’s playboy magazine when he masturbated for the first time.

The whole scene is cool visually. It sounds fun, and weird, and interesting. But what does it mean? Is it real? A complex delusion? A metaphor of losing innocence? A way to show how this city is build on the back of death?

Like I mentioned before, all of these ideas are correct. Which makes them all meaningless.

The people who love this movie seem to only love their interpretation of the movie.

I love the director’s previous film, It Follows. That’s a movie where many people misinterpret it to be about sexually transmitted diseases. But the movie is more about death, the transition to adulthood, and the deconstruction of the American dream. Maybe that sounds like a lot, but each theme is connected and displayed very solidly.

But I didn’t love that movie because of my interpretation of the themes. It Follows also has a likable protagonist that I wanted to see survive. I loved it because I had a strong emotional connection to Jay. And because it was scary and unsettling and had amazing music.

We can pack movies with hidden meanings and let the internet figure things out. We can create a bunch of scenes, put them together, and argue that they aren’t supposed to be coherent. We can fill stories with codes and hidden messages so it seems like we really thought things through.

But if I don’t care about the people in the story, what does it matter?

There’s so much to talk about in this movie.

And maybe I’m making this review long to illustrate my point that the more we talk about Under the Silver Lake, the less fun it gets.

What about the moment in the beginning where the squirrel falls out of the sky?

What about the scene with the owl woman who appears in Sam’s house?

What about the ending with the parrot?

Deconstruct what these mean. Decode the symbolism. Realize its unnecessary nature.

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It’s all too much.

At the end there’s only one number that really matters.

Worth seeing. Not worth re-watching. You could either hate it or love it.

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