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Writer Brian Buster joins me from Los Angeles to discuss David Robert Mitchell’s 2018 mystery Under the Silver Lake, Mitchell’s blank check film after the success of It Follows. Silver Lake played in competition at Cannes but for some reason its distributor A24 got cold feet and after moving the release date a couple of times, dumped it into a few theatres and VOD nearly a year later.

A disaffected and desperate young man named Sam (Andrew Garfield) meets a beautiful blonde (Riley Keough) who vanishes the next day. Sam plays detective to find out where she went, and descends into a mystery world of secret societies, coded messages and conspiracies just below the surface of sunny Tinseltown.

In our spoiler-heavy discussion, Brian and I talk about how Silver Lake anticipated Epstein Brain, this film’s placement in the sub-genre of Ambient Noir, the associations the film has to Hitchcock and Mulholland Drive, and the decoding of the cryptic clues and perceived secret messages of the film taken up online by its fans.

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Trailer for Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell, 2018)