YMMV / Under the Silver Lake

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Sam's pretty good at getting laid, but with Sarah all he got was a kiss before she vanished. Even Millicent let him see her naked. Given Sam's anti-hero standing, his motive to save Sarah could be something far more primal than a desire to right wrongs.
  • Sarah's characterisation is extremely nebulous given her lack of screentime. Since she only has two significant scenes, it's unclear how much of her true self Sam got to see. Especially since she claims in the end that they hardly know each other when they did show signs of genuinely connecting at first.
• Awesome Music: "Turning Teeth", the signature song by Jesus and the Brides is incredibly catchy, which makes sense as it's implied that the band was made to glamourise the idea of harems and religion towards young women.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Sam beating up two of the kids who vandalized his car would be a terrible thing in real life, but in the context of the film, it manages to cross the line into Black Comedy, especially when he grabs one of the boys and shoves a raw egg down his throat.
• Epileptic Trees: Between the true identity of the dog-killer (majority seem to think it's Sam) and the reasons why the secret society would leave clues well within reach of guys like Sam, it's a veritable treasure-trove of interpretations.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The conspiracy is ultimately revealed to be a cult of rich men who wish to ascend to the stars out of boredom with the mundane world. Come 2021 and several high-profile billionaires have procured ways to travel into space for the thrill of it.
• Moral Event Horizon: Jefferson Sevence teetered on the line when he abandoned his family to live underground with a harem of women half his age. The poor souls who were forced to play their corpses when they faked their deaths also makes him pretty loathsome. But ultimately the worst thing that came about from Sevence's selfishness was letting the assassins who guarded his whereabouts kill his own daughter and leave her body to potentially lie undiscovered at the bottom of the lake - all because she got too close to his secret.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Songwriter appears only in a single scene, but his dialogue with Sam, which is accompanied by him playing snippets of various hit songs on his piano, is one of the most memorable parts of the film. It also helps that the scene is a relatively straightforward criticism of popular music in a film that's otherwise incredibly complicated and deliberately misleads its viewers.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Balloon Girl dancing to "Turning Teeth".
  • Sam dreaming of Sarah skinny-dipping.
  • The Songwriter revealing the ugly truth behind pop culture.
• Squick:
  • When Sam is attacking Jesus, the latter is naked and taking a rather noisy dump, and the camera cuts to a loving close-up of his feces for no particular reason.
  • The repeated, close-up shots of The Songwriter's shattered face as Sam continues to pulverize it with Kurt Cobain's guitar.
• Tearjerker: The general vibe of the ending. Sam having to let go of Sarah forever is depressing enough, but once he puts the whole conspiracy behind him, everything just seems so empty. The billboard that featured his ex is being gradually replaced. Sam eats crackers with orange juice because that's the only thing he really knew about Sarah. Sam tries watching a Golden Age romance, but knowing for sure that it's all a front for a secret society sucks the joy out of it. The final scene is Sam watching his landlord and a cop break into his apartment to forcibly evict him and all Sam can do is watch from his neighbour's balcony with total apathy.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Millicent Sevence is set up as an important character throughout, but in the end exists just to further Sam's journey, with little characterisation and a death which whilst important narratively and symbolically reduces her to a prop in the film's story. The same could be said of any character who is not Sam, especially Sarah, a role that totally wastes Riley Keough.
  • The Pirate who accompanies Sarah's roommates and the other trio of women is set up as a major figure, but he only gets three brief appearances in the first half of the movie and is never acknowledged after that.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Songwriter is clearly a younger actor wearing pounds of old age makeup and looks kind of off as a result, though this adds to his low-key menace rather than detracts from it.

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