Under the Silver Lake is a unique film that defies conventional judgment. It will not leave you indifferent — you’ll either love it or absolutely hate it. It’s also a total nightmare for any studio or producer, which makes the very fact that this film exists something of a miracle — and its production a mystery in itself.

“We crave mystery because there’s none left.”

If we try to answer the question of what Under the Silver Lake actually is, this definition comes to mind: it’s a film about people obsessed with the search for hidden meanings — a film that mocks the very idea of such searches.

It’s hard to put into words just how overloaded this movie is with references, mysteries, ciphers, and puzzles — there’s an unimaginable number of them. But what’s more important is this: solving all these puzzles will lead you nowhere. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much time and effort you invest, you won’t change the fact that Under the Silver Lake is about mystery for the sake of mystery.

And only the most attentive and educated cinephiles, geeks, and code-lovers will be able to unravel it.

Example of a cipher.

In the opening café scene (see pics above), we see a sign on the window: BEWARE THE DOG KILLER. Then the camera turns inside, and we see the customers — one of whom is wearing a T-shirt with images of animals. If you take the first letter of each animal’s name and try to form a sentence, you get: BWAR DOG KILR.

The most obvious and significant film reference in David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake appears right at the beginning — it’s a nod to Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The main character in Rear Window, stuck in his New York apartment with a broken leg, spends his time watching neighbors through binoculars. Garfield’s character in Under the Silver Lake does the same.

This reference is a kind of hint to the viewer — to watch everything happening on screen more attentively, literally through binoculars, and not to miss the encoded messages left by the filmmakers.

Hitchcock will show up more than once in Mitchell’s film. A Rear Window poster decorates the bedroom of Garfield’s character, and a plaster cast of Grace Kelly’s face — the star of Rear Window — is shown later in the apartment of the comic book author from Under the Silver Lake. To top it off, Sam ends up in a cemetery standing right in front of the legendary director’s grave.

Sam’s bored expression and the presence of the half-naked hippie neighbor are also important references — this time to the neo-noir detective The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman. In that film, the private detective Philip Marlowe is so passive and laid-back that he completely ignores the naked hippie women outside his window. Also, his cat leaves him, and he is constantly followed by dogs. If the dog theme in Under the Silver Lake is already obvious — it literally follows the viewer throughout the film — the cat one is more subtle.

In Under the Silver Lake, Garfield’s character is sprayed by a skunk — a twilight animal that is mostly active at night and visually resembles a cat (remember that detail about twilight — we’ll need it later).
The skunk’s stench that now follows Sam is a metaphor for the character’s inner decay. The fact that a homeless man later tracks Sam down by that smell hints at Sam’s future — he too will become homeless by the film’s end.

Looking at the sheer number of riddles in Under the Silver Lake, the question naturally arises — who came up with all of them? Was it really the director himself? No — the film’s ciphers were created by a renowned cryptographer named Kevin Knight, the very same person who deciphered the Zodiac Killer’s alphabet — the one that remained unsolved for nearly 30 years.

By the way, the Zodiac alphabet is used in one of the most complex and interesting puzzles in the film — one that we’ll refer to as “The Mystery of Three.”

In Sam’s room, during a news broadcast, a headline scrolls across the screen that reads: COPIALE GRAFFITI DISCOVERED IN DOWNTOWN LA — 
which refers to the discovery of so-called Copiale graffiti in the center of Los Angeles.

The Copiale Cipher is a German encrypted manuscript from the second half of the 18th century. It contains information about a secret society similar to the Freemasons, called “Oculists.” The code used in the manuscript turned out to be a substitution cipher. And interestingly, one of the scientists who cracked it was Kevin Knight — the same man behind the ciphers in Under the Silver Lake.

The Copiale Cipher appears twice in the film: once on a wall in the form of graffiti, and once in a bathroom stall. Decoding both inscriptions (the alphabet is shown in pics above) reveals the same two words:
COFFEE MENU. This takes us back to the café menu shown at the beginning of the film.

While Sam is staring at a blonde girl, we get a chance to look at the café menu — and at the very bottom, written in chalk, is a combination of dots and dashes:
−··− ·−−− ···− −−− / −−− ·−−− ·−· −·−− / −··− · ·−· ··· ·−−

It’s Morse code, and it translates to: XJVO OJRY XERSW — yet another cipher, the key to which is found in one of the scenes at the comic book author’s house.

Decoding gives us the phrase: WHAT THRE WORDS — obviously a typo or a cipher distortion for WHAT THREE WORDS. To fully decrypt it, we need another key — found on an advertising billboard that reads: “I can see clearly now.” In the bottom left corner of the billboard, there’s a note:
E = EE.

Applying this rule to the previous cipher, we finally get:
WHAT THREE WORDS.

A quick Google search brings us to the real-world website what3words.com, a service that divides the Earth’s surface into 3x3 meter squares, each encoded with a unique combination of three words. (And it’s worth noting that the number three appears constantly throughout the film.)

Pay attention: the logo of the what3words website includes a symbol of three parallel lines — a symbol that also appears in the film as one of the codes used by the homeless. Its meaning is ominous: “This is not a safe place.”

In Sarah’s room, we see three dolls: Betty, Marilyn, and Lauren — a reference to the film How to Marry a Millionaire, which Sarah is watching in the same scene. Under the dolls’ names are inscriptions written in Zodiac alphabet, which decode to: TOMBSTONE SHERIFF ENTRIES.

If you enter those three words into what3words (with dots between them), you get coordinates to a real location in Sequoia National Park, California. Unfortunately, what’s actually hidden at that location in real life remains unknown.

In an interview, the film’s director David Robert Mitchell mentioned that he’s fascinated by people who believe in conspiracy theories and are constantly searching for hidden truths. Sam is a collective image of all those people — geeks, cinephiles, and obsessive minds alike. At the same time, Mitchell adds with regret:

Pop culture is dead.

This statement is tied to the film’s most crucial scene — when Sam meets a music producer who claims to have written every pop hit of the last few decades. This revolting old man strips meaning from everything that once brought joy and inspiration to Sam — music, memories, youth. In this moment, all the illusions that guided Sam begin to fall apart.

The identity of the dog killer — whose wanted posters and graffiti are scattered all over the city — is never revealed. But this mystery, like the others in Under the Silver Lake, is a deliberate puzzle left by Mitchell for the audience to solve (or not). If you recall the sci-fi noir Dark City, it featured a similar setup: everyone was searching for a prostitute killer who turned out to be the protagonist himself — or rather, the erased version of his identity, wiped out by alien experiments. This may be just a coincidence — but the rest of the clues point directly to Garfield’s character as the dog killer.

There’s a lot of anger inside Sam — and it fully surfaces in the scene where he brutally beats up a group of kids. The accumulated bitterness and emotional pain from his breakup may well have been projected onto the dogs. Supporting this theory is the fact that most of the “Wanted” messages about the dog killer appear in locations connected to Sam’s past relationships. There’s also the skunk motif — its stench, which symbolically follows Sam and represents his inner decay. Skunks are nocturnal creatures — just like the dog killer.

Sam himself once had a dog, but he claims it was killed during a robbery.
That dog was likely his first victim — the catalyst that allowed him to justify everything that followed. The robbery story served as a convenient excuse for Sam: the reason he can’t pay for his car or apartment is because of that incident. But when you look at Sam — a bored drifter in a city as expensive as Los Angeles — it’s not hard to imagine that he simply wasted all his money.

In fact, the answer to this question was given right at the start of the article — where it was stated that solving the film’s many puzzles leads nowhere. There is no meaning behind what happens in Under the Silver Lake — and that is the perfect MacGuffin, according to Alfred Hitchcock, whom Mitchell greatly admires and repeatedly references in the film.

The term MacGuffin was coined by Hitchcock himself. He described it like this:

“It’s the object everyone in the film is chasing — secret documents, for example, that the spies are after.”

But a MacGuffin doesn’t have to be an object — it can also be a person (the blonde woman, in Sam’s case) or even an idea (the decoding of ciphers — for the viewer). And Hitchcock believed that the best MacGuffin is one that doesn’t even exist — just a pure pretext, a hole in a donut.

Sam’s journey is full of adventures — but ultimately pointless. That’s why, in the final scene, Sam seems totally indifferent to everything. He’s having sex with the elderly hippie (a symbol of apathy) and smiling as he watches himself get evicted from his apartment. There’s nothing left for him to do but look at his life from the outside — with a fresh gaze, free from illusions, pain, and endless searching — and simply enjoy what’s left.