What Follows It Follows?

David Robert Mitchell on his ambitious, divisive, long-awaited new movie, Under the Silver Lake.

- Lane Brown

THE FILM IS a mystery and there are mysteries inside of that mystery, and some of the characters could be considered mysteries themselves,” says David Robert Mitchell. “Will I explain any of them? No.”

We’re sitting in the cafeteria at L.A.’s Griffith Observatory last May, and the 44-year-old writer-director, unshaven with middle-parted Jesus hair, is politely but not so helpfully answering my questions about Under the Silver Lake, his new, deliberately overcomplicated surrealist neo-noir, which at the time was scheduled to premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival the following week and open in theaters a month later.

If you know who Mitchell is, it’s probably as the filmmaker behind It Follows, the 2015 thriller about a young woman who, after sleeping with a sketchy new boyfriend, is stalked through the Detroit suburbs by a supernatural pedestrian who will kill her unless she passes the curse to another sexual partner. Mining high-end scares from its deceptively low-end premise, It Follows was, at least by Rotten Tomatoes’ measure, the bestreviewed American horror film in nearly three decades and helped light the fuse for the recent boom in wellmade scary movies that have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars and even occasionally been described, with a straight face, as prestigious.