Summary
Return to Silent Hill is a dreadful, confounding adaptation, changing or ruining a lot of what was great about the game while delivering nothing in its place for fans of horror cinema.
Back in the halcyon days when it was generally understood that every live-action adaptation of a video game would be unforgivably terrible, Christophe Gans’s 2006 Silent Hill stood out as one of the better efforts. It wasn’t good, you understand, but it wasn’t woeful either, and for fans of the games it offered enough familiarity and respect for the source material to qualify as passable. Times have changed since then, and in a film and TV climate irrevocably altered by the success of stuff like Arcane, Fallout, and The Last of Us, passable will no longer cut it. Sadly, Gans’s return to Silent Hill in – ahem – Return to Silent Hill isn’t even passable.
The better word might be “dreadful”. The writing was perhaps on the wall, in blood or some other bodily excretion given the franchise, when it became clear that the second sequel – there was a first, MJ Bassett’s Silent Hill: Revelation, which culture has collectively agreed to pretend doesn’t exist – was going to be a fairly direct adaptation of Silent Hill 2, which in the pantheon of video game horror is basically Zeus. It’s a fundamentally terrible idea at the best of times, but it has also been handled pretty badly, with a few utterly confounding decisions that fundamentally alter the game’s most essential texture. Oops.
But the broad strokes are familiar. Struggling artist and former Silent Hill resident James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) is recalled to the spooky New England town by a letter from his dead wife, Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson, Smoke), but finds the place not at all how he recalls it. Sure, he’s drunk all the time, but that doesn’t quite explain why the whole place is blanketed with ash, why all the roads are closed, or why various recognisable monstrosities are shambling around the streets.
This is a lot like the game. So, too, is the subsequent hesitant exploration of the town, which works in the game because it’s kind of the point, but doesn’t work in a feature film because it feels aimless and lethargic. The early portions of Return to Silent Hill feel like a deliberate effort to frontload as many memorable creature designs and beats as possible, but it feels awkwardly stuck between the freer pacing of a game and the needs of a movie to get things done and dusted inside a couple of hours. The result is a whiplash-inducing structure that ping-pongs between drab inaction and incomprehensible CGI-embellished dross.
There are very few supporting players here – characters from the game, like Maria, Angela (Eve Macklin), Laura (Evie Templeton, Wednesday), and Eddie (Pearse Egan), do make appearances, though often only brief ones – so Irvine is forced to carry the entire film, and while he does a half-decent drunk turn and can occasionally seem believably petrified, he isn’t up to the task. This may well be a consequence of the script, though, which changes key plot points from the game and tries to insert some original threads and a looping connection to Gans’s previous movie and other Silent Hill titles. It’s a weird hodgepodge that eventually becomes impossible to make sense of.
There are scant highlights. The creature design is pretty good, but that’s to be expected since they’re lifted directly from the game, which was itself a triumph in this area. The game’s composer, Akira Yamaoka, also handled the score, which is fair enough. But sounding great isn’t enough when nothing else is any good.
Truthfully, I was drawn to Return to Silent Hill mostly as a curiosity, since I wondered how it would adapt such a beloved and impressive title. While watching, though, I began to wonder what someone who wasn’t familiar with the game would think about this, and none of the answers were complimentary. Sometimes, no knowledge of the source material can help, but in this case, the ways the movie recreates – or doesn’t – Silent Hill 2 are the only interesting things about it. It isn’t frightening or engaging on its own terms, and offers nothing beyond confusion for fans of horror cinema. As it turns out, returning to Silent Hill wasn’t such a good idea after all.
