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It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Scott Tobias and Genevieve Kovic. Keith Phipps is out this week. We think he's tracking down some mystery inspired by some words that surfaced in his alphabet soup. It was a little hard to parse his last message. Last week we looked at the sunlit L.A. Noir of Roman Polansky's Chinatown. This week, we're looking at its modern equivalent, David Robert Mitchell's wandering, shaggy, endlessly referential mystery under the Silver Lake. Mitchell makes it clear throughout the film that he has equal parts love of and loathing for L.A. with its quirky, self-involved scenesters, its behind-the-scenes manipulators, and its endless hunt for fame and meeting and satisfaction. But that may be the only thing that's really clear in his script, which has a jobless waste rule named Sam, played by former Spider-Man Andrew Garfield, tracking down a sort of formless mystery. See, this neighbor Sarah, played by American Honey's Riley Keog, moved in, and he kind of wanted to have sex with her.

And then she kind of abruptly moved out.

Like, that's a mystery for the ages, right?

At least it starts to feel like a mystery for the ages once you bring in a disappeared billionaire, a serial dog murderer, a guy running around in a bad pirate costume, a naked female assassin in an owl mask, secret messages in music,

secret messages in a crackpot zine, secret messages in a video game magazine, secret messages on

stadium scoreboards, and really just secret messages everywhere. Under the Silver Lake isn't as

tightly plotted as Chinatown, but in its way, it's just as stark and cynical about human nature.

It's unclear whether Mitchell thinks there are any central truths we can get to,

and whether they're fundamentally meaningful, and whether we can do anything about them.

It's also not necessarily clear whether he thinks Sam is tapped into something fundamental

and significant about the world, or he's just another paranoid seeing signals everywhere.

We'll dig into how these two mystery films compare after this break.

Who moves out in the middle of the night?

Nothing strange about it.

She wanted to leave.

How does that not make sense?

...