To Spread Or Constrict: UNDER THE SILVER LAKE and READY OR NOT

The first time I saw David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, I found myself amused and impressed from scene to scene, but struggling to engage. I could see where things reappeared, where logos and lines bobbed to the surface before diving back under. I knew everything was intentional even if I just couldn’t quite crack the puzzle. It wasn’t until well after the film, after several internet rabbit holes, that I stumbled upon a theory that explained the film’s odd structure. Suddenly everything clicked. I had to talk about it. What may have seemed like excitement about the movie may really have just been the elation of understanding something so previously frustrating and opaque.

I thought about Mulholland Drive a lot while watching David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake, and not just because they both took place in a Los Angeles full of dreams, whispers, and mysteries. Both films share a dream-like logic that connects just enough to string you along, but doesn’t fully reveal it’s power until long after you’ve seen it. I’m not sure that Silver Lake will hold the same cultural cachet as Lynch’s Drive (or even share the same emotional resonance), but I do feel pretty confident it will gain a cult following – at least as much a cult following as you can develop in the Age of Streaming.

Back in 2017, only four months before seeing Mulholland Drive for the first time (obviously, I was very late to the David Lynch Party), I saw Jordan Peele’s debut film Get Out in theaters. Peele set up such a simple, efficient premise in a huge house in the South and paid it off beautifully, with masterful performances, editing, sound, everything. It had not an ounce of fat to it, a muscular tale dipped in the kind of sticky social commentary that you can’t unsee.

I’m not sure why you’d place Mulholland Drive and Get Out together in any kind of double feature except as a way to show the power of original films and what they can do. We still talk about both films today. One is longer, dream-like, a mystery you can’t quite figure out until long after (and even then, you may not feel 100% on it). The other is an airtight bit of storytelling puzzle that barely lets you breathe after all the pieces lock into place. 

I bring up both films because the following night after watching Under the Silver Lake, my fiancé and I went to see Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready Or Not. Under the Silver Lake shared a similar lengthy runtime with Mulholland Drive (140 min vs 147 min), whereas Ready Or Not shared Get Out’s leaner, meaner structure (94 min vs 104 min). The rhymes were already there. Ready Or Not then showed itself to be the 2019 completion of my weirdo 2017 original film double feature. Get Out uses the premise of meeting parents for the first time. Ready Or Not extends it to marrying into a new family. Get Out uses it’s social horror angle with surgical precision. Ready Or Not throws quick darts of pointed commentary about class and the absurd actions of the absurdly wealthy.

Both 2019 films have protagonists with wildly different psychological geographies they’re dealing with. Silver Lake’s Sam (Andrew Garfield) is an adrift 33-year-old, stumbling around until a woman mysteriously vanishes. And while he definitely stumbles even further beyond that, he’s moving towards trying to decode a mystery that goes in all directions. He is a man who feels the tightening muscles of a society he’s not interested in partaking in – it’s not clear if he even has a job and he’s so behind on his rent he’s about to be evicted – but who is slowly freed by the strands of this mystery that pulls all over the city.

Ready or Not’s Grace (Samara Weaving) is about to marry into her husband’s wealthy, odd family. The film sets up its premise with maximum efficiency. What starts off looking like simple wedding day jitters gives way to a soon-to-be-husband clearly terrified to introduce his new wife to his family’s sick, twisted tradition. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett lay out the rules of the game quickly, clearing the board for the narrative screws to be tightened. After Grace begins her first, unknowing steps into the game, the look on the faces of every family member says it all: something very, very wrong is about to go down. Whereas Under the Silver Lake expanded as the story went on, Ready Or Not is a boa constrictor, closing in on Grace – and the audience – in both time and space. Like with Chris in Get Out, we’re rooting for our protagonist to escape an especially nasty family situation, with similar beats in which allegiances shift and especially brutal deaths are met.

While Ready or Not is a much bigger crowd-pleaser of the two 2019 films, both are original visions deserving of a look. Both are clear remixes of their influences. Both are brought to the screen by younger, scrappy filmmakers. Under the Silver Lake was produced and distributed by Megan Ellison’s A24, a studio responsible for some of our biggest critical hits of the past decade (The Master, Moonlight, Ex Machina, Lady Bird) and which has had to pare down its operations to stay alive in the theatrical seas a Kraken-like Disney is currently throwing its weight around. As much as a gamble as Silver Lake must have been, A24’s upcoming swings with Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse and the Safdie Brother’s Uncut Gems (even with an Oscar-possible performance from Adam Sandler) are just as risky as the many, many chances that came before it.

When the Fox Searchlight logo in front of Ready or Not played out, I thought it must have been one of the last few Fox projects to squeak through new Disney’s doors after their acquisition last spring. It turns out Disney’s distribution power allowed Ready Or Not to be it’s widest release yet at 2,818 screens last weekend. It’s impossible to tell just what Fox Searchlight will be allowed to make after it exhausts the rest of its pre-Disney production slate. Noah Hawley’s Lucky in the Sky and Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit are most definitely not kosher in the Mouse House, regardless of how much Disney loves Waititi after he turned around the Thor franchise with Ragnorak.

2019 is a year where it’s easy to complain about the dearth of original films in theaters. A year in which Disney already has FIVE $1 billion dollar earners, all of which are comic-book franchises, sequels or remakes – and still have Frozen 2 and Rise of the Skywalker coming. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime are doing what they can to support fresher visions, but not all of them are making it outside of their streaming services and family rooms across the world. Under the Silver Lake and Ready Or Not, each in their own way, shows there’s still hope for a unique, satisfying theatrical experience.