Return To Silent Hill

While the film got a kicking back in 2006, time seems to have been kind to the original adaptation of video game Silent Hill. The bar has never been high when it comes to cinematic game adaptations, but thanks to an aesthetic that did the games proud and a genuinely nasty, creepy atmosphere, Christophe Gans managed to craft a decent, if unexceptional, homage to the iconic horror game. Twenty years on, Gans — like his protagonist —  returns to the mist-shrouded New England town of Silent Hill, this time to take a stab at the first game’s sequel: video game hall-of-famer Silent Hill 2.

We follow artist and former Silent Hill resident James (Jeremy Irvine), a man whose morbid obsessions are taken to new heights by the appearance of a mysterious letter purporting to be from his dead wife. Half drunk and lost in grief, he sets off to discover its origin, journeying back to the spooky locale the pair once shared a home in.

Things in Silent Hill are bad, he soon discovers, and not simply ‘road closed on the way to work’ bad. There are faceless bodies vomiting black goo and ash perpetually falling from the sky. It’s a surprise, then, that regardless of these obvious horrors, James spends a large portion of the film bumbling around with no real sense of purpose — in many ways not unlike watching someone else play the game, near perfectly recreating the controller-throwing delirium of not knowing what your next objective is.

Destined to find a home at the top of the bargain bin.

Irvine carries the majority of the film solo, with only a slim supporting cast and a few scenes shared with Hannah Emily Anderson as dead girlfriend Mary. While he capably sells being terrified for the majority of the film, dramatic scenes are dragged down by an underwritten script. Meanwhile, a mix of poor lighting and CGI sludge makes some of the action near indecipherable, just as the story takes a turn for the incomprehensible.

If there are positives to be found, the film does deserve praise for its creature design, which cleaves faithfully to the game and is as twisted and disturbing as you might hope. Plus, Silent Hill 2 composer Akira Yamaoka returns, bringing with him the dread-laden, acoustic melancholy and grinding industrial fusion that proved so effective in the game.

It’s hard to know who, in the end, this adaptation is truly for, though. As a horror film, it fails to properly get under your skin or drum up real scares — which feels like a sin with creature design this glorious and such a famously terrifying game to draw upon. Meanwhile, the narrative changes and whistle-stop tour of the game’s plot are sure to frustrate fans. With TV continuing to knock game adaptations out of the park with the likes of The Last Of Us, Fallout and Arcane, Return To Silent Hill instead earns a spot alongside the likes of Mortal Kombat and Doom, destined to find a home at the top of the bargain bin.