After Sarah disappears without a trace, Sam breaks into her empty apartment and finds a shoebox in Sarah’s closet. It appears to be her favorite movie because she has a vintage framed poster on her wall and special edition dolls of the three leads on her dresser. They watch the 1953 Marilyn Monroe film How to Marry a Millionaire in Sarah's bedroom. Sam awkwardly denies the accusation, and the two get high. During their introduction, Sarah recalls Coca-Cola as “like a ray of sunshine,” an old Coke slogan she learned from her grandmother, who she refers to as “a smart lady.” Sam proclaims to Sarah that his dog recently “died” (remember that, too) and she invites him inside and flirtatiously accuses him of spying on her from his balcony. On his way home from the Last Bookstore, Sam shuffles home where he discovers Sarah’s dog “Coca-Cola,” who Sam feeds a red dog biscuit (remember this). As the film strongly suggests, subliminal messages secretly embedded throughout pop culture essentially made him crazy - but how? There’s complex stuff at work behind Sam’s curtain, and his secrets are beginning to unravel as fast as he unravels the conspiracy, but it’s all he knows. A powerless guy stripped of hope in an unfair, unjust world, Sam is acting out and demanding to be seen, and his dog killing exploits are his way of seeking acknowledgment from the banal existence that’s turned its back on him. He’s a clinically depressed, (possibly) paranoid schizophrenic fogging the lines of his reality with homicidal fallacies based on fictional film fantasies in a world controlled by a shadowy elite. ![]() Though the film is surreal and absurdist, it suggests, is it Los Angeles that's odd, or is it merely Sam? The answer is unequivocally both. Sam’s a disarmingly charming guy who leers more than seems publicly appropriate with a penchant for stalker-like conduct and violent outbursts, internally angry with his current situation, but the red flags are harder to spot when you have a face like Andrew Garfield. The most obvious and glaring answer to the ending is that Sam, despondent and unstable, is the infamous Dog Killer, pointing to his increasingly abnormal nocturnal behavior and deteriorating mental health (the night terrors, the hallucinations, etc.). He consistently changes the subject when talking about the Dog Killer. Sam is clearly in pain, and vulnerable and, coupled with his career stagnation and deteriorating mental state, manifests a full-blown psychological breakdown. Sam softens and empathetically replies that it’s hard to gauge what a person might do when in pain. He cracked the code, uncovered a conspiracy, and still came up empty, which is classic Film Noir 101.Īt a rooftop party searching for clues, Allen ( Jimmi Simpson) and a party goer in a green dress criticize an off-the-rails Millicent Sevence ( Callie Hernandez). What’s most baffling is that Sam’s suspicions were correct. Sarah, to Sam, is a Marilyn Monroe reincarnate, a fabrication of his warped psyche that he feels compelled to rescue. ![]() ![]() ![]() Sam sees Sarah as iconography, a trophy to place atop his mantle like the film award he’ll never obtain. Sam lives a double life in a deluded Hollywood fantasy, an amoral leading man with a twisted sense of reality, and an obsessive infatuation with the opposite sex. RELATED: 8 Most Underrated A24 Movies, Ranked Ending Explained Hilarity, violence, and madcap antics ensue. The film follows Sam as he descends into a hotbed of half-cocked conspiracy theories to uncover the mystery behind Sarah’s disappearance. Then one evening, a mysterious girl named Sarah ( Riley Keough) moves in, becoming the object of his deluded affections, before abruptly disappearing without a trace. Sam also believes to have cracked a secret code hidden in the eye movements of Wheel of Fortune co-host Vanna White. Sam doesn’t get out much and uses binoculars to creep on his topless neighbor from the shadows of his dilapidated apartment balcony.
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