It Follows' director is back with Under the Silver Lake

It Follows and The Myth of the American Sleepover director David Robert Mitchell is one of our favourite young American filmmakers, so we’re delighted to see him back again with the intriguing-looking Under the Silver Lake. A comic noir, the film follows Andrew Garfield as Sam, an aimless young man who becomes an unwitting detective when he goes in search of a neighbour (and girl he likes) who’s gone missing overnight without a trace, played by Riley Keough.

“Who moves out in the middle of the night?" Sam asks his landlord in the trailer. "Nothing strange about it," replies the landlord. “Maybe she didn't like you. Maybe she knows you're poor and haven't paid your rent."

From the trailer, which was released last night, the mystery looks to send him down a surreal rabbit hole into Los Angeles' underworld. He begins to become obsessed by strange codes and symbols he finds during his search, which only makes the mystery deepen and the film begins to look as nightmarish and surreal as Mitchell's previous film, 2014 horror It Follows.

When we spoke to Mitchell back in 2014 at the London Film Festival, he discussed his pleasure in making cinema that’s dream-like and otherworldly. “There’s so much room in film to change the starting point of what we assume to be reality,” he told us. “Very often we take it at face value that the movie is our world and I like the idea that maybe it’s not quite our world, and that’s fun to me.” The trailer of Under the Silver Lake suggests he’s carrying on with this sensibility.

Indie US distributors A24 – who distributed Lady Bird, Good Time and The Florida Project last year in the States – have acquired rights to Under the Silver Lake, which is scheduled for release on 22 Jun in the USA. We may also see the film make its premiere at Cannes, where It Follows also made its bow. Watch the trailer in the player above, or on YouTube here.