RETURN TO SILENT HILL Review: A Major Disappointment

There's a moment in the game, Silent Hill 2, when the player, as protagonist James, is alone exploring an abandoned apartment building and sees an unmoving creature on the opposite side of steel bars that divide a hallway.

 

The creature is the now iconic Pyramid Head, a hulking, masculine body with a massive, triangular metal headpiece that wields a knife the size of a person. Whether the player approaches the bars, runs away, or tries to attack through them, the monster remains frozen, menacing and imminent. It's an incredible moment, perfectly in line with the kind of atmospheric and psychological horror that's made Silent Hill 2 a beloved classic (and one that recently received the remake treatment). 

 

In the new film Return to Silent Hill, which is based on Silent Hill 2, James is in the company of two other characters who all hear Pyramid Head coming down the hall, intercut with images of its knife cutting up and sparking on a rusty floor, before it arrives and repeatedly slams its body into the bars in an attempt to reach James. Rather than a deeply unsettling monumental image, the movie serves audiences a sequence full of sound and fury that screams at them to be scared, but has foregone everything that made the original moment so effective. 

 

I won't spend more time comparing the movie to the game, as it will be easy enough to find others detailing the many changes to the story. Suffice to say, Return to Silent Hill is not the "faithful adaptation" that has been advertised, and its changes are more damaging than simply deviating from canon. I highlight the differences of this particular moment because it's indicative of Return to Silent Hill's failure as a film. 

 

Which is all the more disappointing given that the other inevitable point of comparison, the 2006 Silent Hill movie directed by Return's director and co-writer Christophe Gans, is a remarkable piece of video game adaptation, even if it is a flawed film. Watching Silent Hill (2006) feels like playing one of the games; there's a sense of dread built out of an equally alluring and oppressive atmosphere that gives way to genuinely shocking moments, all in service to a story with surprising thematic heft (albeit with some very clunky exposition drops). 

 

Return to Silent Hill, on the other hand, begins with a fairly weak, very "tell, don't show" story that is easy enough to follow but impossible to become invested in, before falling apart entirely. 

 

 

The first third cuts between James (Jeremy Irvine) returning to the town of Silent Hill seeking his girlfriend Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) and a backstory of their lives in the town as James discovers her ties to a cult. While their inclusion may be a misguided attempt to bridge the lore of the first film with a narrative adaptation of the second game, the cult doesn't get much explanation and thus isn't so much scary as they are a plot device that's given both too much and too little time in the film. The flimsy cult plotline gives the impression that a lot was cut.

 

As it goes on, the movie begins to feel less like a story and more like a barely connected procession of sequences. It slavishly checks boxes for events and places from the game without taking time to establish any emotional motivation whatsoever, leaving most of the story seemingly motivated by "this happens next in the game." It's the cinematic equivalent of playing a game with different levels that have no ties to one another beyond being the next thing to do. When it ends, it doesn't feel like you've engaged with a story as much as a group of images. 

 

Some of the images are compelling. Blue moths entirely covering a mannequin and the same moths inside the open face of a bust manage to achieve the melancholic disturbing beauty of the franchise at its best. A few moments of James exploring dark spaces with a flashlight offer some lovely moving shadows. The slightly changed monsters from the game look varying degrees of good; one is disturbing in a way that lands on the line of questionable taste without falling firmly on the side of bad taste, and one of the original creations for the film is successfully squirm-inducing. 

 

But the whole thing has a plasticy look that equally affects the costumes, the faces of the actors, and the world. This artificial look may be a result of attempts to believably place characters in some mostly computer-generated worlds. If it is, it fails, as there are several moments of poor composites where Irvine looks so separate from the world around him that it's shocking when he touches something solid that seemed on a different plane of existence. 

 

Return to Silent Hill tosses out plot points and ineffective horror set pieces without emotionally developing its characters or creating an atmosphere that could make its narrative failings forgivable. The images that pop are few, and rather than functioning as a phantasmagoria that draws viewers in, its aesthetic is often hard to look at. As an adaptation of one of the best video games ever made from a filmmaker who successfully translated the games' world to film before, it's a major disappointment. 

 

As a movie, it's just bad. 

 

The film opens Friday, January 21, only in movie theaters, via Iconic Events Releasing. Visit the official for locations and showtimes.