Overall Rating
  Awesome: 20.45%
Worth A Look: 23.86%
Average: 23.3%
Pretty Bad: 25%
Total Crap: 7.39%
11 reviews, 110 user ratings
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| Silent Hill |
by William Goss
"You'll Never Lurk In This Town Again"
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Director Christophe Gans decides to follow up 2001’s delicious genre stew 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' with a big-budget video-game adaptation. However, despite the relatively nightmarish imagery stemming from its source, 'Silent Hill' isn’t all that scary, creepy, freaky, disturbing, or unnerving until its final act. As A video game movie, it takes a few steps in the right direction. As THIS video game movie, it could use some work.After an opening that requires the main characters to live unreasonably close to Ohio’s steepest waterfall and its adjacent cliffs, Rose (Radha Mitchell) decides that the best thing to do for her detached sleepwalker of an adopted daughter is to take her to the very place she frequently screams about, the abandoned town of Silent Hill, West Virginia. A car accident knocks Rose unconscious and, upon awaking, she finds her daughter (Jodelle Ferland) missing. She begins to search the ghost town, where sirens signify the periodic arrival of a dark force and several bizarre creatures. It would appear that Silent Hill exists on parallel planes, distinctly alternating environments of ash and dust with rain and rust whenever danger looms. Rose is pursued immediately by a cop (Laurie Holden) and eventually by her husband, Chris (Sean Bean), who remains in the real world as he investigates the disappearance of his wife and daughter.
For the first act, Rose is essentially wandering around, searching for her brat while still adjusting to the frequent transformation of her surroundings from an eerie ghost town to a musty industrial wasteland worthy of a tetanus shot, armed only with a flashlight that emits a whine that increases in pitch and nuisance when aimed towards the screen. The second act partners Rose with the officer, and they do more of the same together, although they do meet Silent Hill’s human population, a gaggle of religious zealots with a penchant for biblical banter and ceremonial burning, they may not be in any less danger. Along with a handful of motifs (even down to a cross-shaped playground hopscotch that begins at Hell and ends in Heaven), the third act has our heroine journeying into the very inferno that engulfed the town in flames decades before in an effort to find the answers she needs and the thrills Silent Hill lacks.
Gans, although armed with quite an accomplished atmosphere, creates a slightly awkward mesh of mystery and horror; however, the story does make sense, if only courtesy of a lengthy chunk of exposition that fills in all of the blanks and renders Bean’s role redundant. A deliberate narrative vagueness plagues the majority of the film, only to have every single thread tidied up too much. Such faithfulness to the game somewhat backfires on the film, making the first half something of an endurance test and the second half less fulfilling than select omissions may have made it. The story’s cohesion is one thing, but the storyteller’s competence is another.
Mitchell, a fine actress with just enough chops to withstand work like this, doesn’t particularly lend her character any sincere motivation in the early segments, and before you can ask, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?,” the scream routine commences and she proves adequate for the task. Meanwhile, Bean finds himself relegated to the realm of Expositionville, where his scenes could easily have been excised (and make the film not only shorter, but leaner as a result). Ferland actually improves on her screwy, whiny, and ultimately grating first impression when she goes into evil territory without overdoing it. Thankfully, Holden manages to not only contribute several keen observations, but also repeat them at increasing volume. For example, the first hour brings “What the fuck is going on?!?,” while the second offers “What the fuck is wrong with you people?!?,” both rather succinct and insightful summaries for those equally baffled at the moment. Who better to ask the tough questions than a gun-toting chick with quite the fondness for leather and utter lack of character development?
The fun, though, doesn’t stop there. Personal favorites include the immortal remarks “It looks like there was a fire” (when addressing a burnt building in a town devastated by fire) and “Look, I’m burning!” (a comment made by a young girl when her arms do, in fact, catch ablaze). Don’t worry: there’s more where that came from, courtesy of Roger Avery, a screenwriter whose previous works include The Rules of Attraction and Pulp Fiction (!). It’s not that the story calls for witty banter or anything especially constructive, but the middle third in particular is chock full of zingers like these. Sigh.
Just when it seems that all hope is lost, the film suddenly shifts from a stubbornly stagnant supernatural mystery to harsh horror, much to its own benefit. Despite spending additional time with those blabbering religionistas, this is when Silent Hill decides to get down and dirty, kicking things off with a healthy helping of seamless skinning and faceless-freak-nurse-on-faceless-freak-nurse action, and although it seems superficial to say that the going gets good once the going gets gory, Gans and Avery tap into a newfound confidence for disturbing his viewers instead of perturbing them. It seems somewhat surprising that an American studio would bother with a film so muddled, then with a film so messy. I don’t want to oversell it, but it seems that perhaps the filmmakers were merely sandbagging in an effort to elevate their finale to some shade of delightful dementia. Whatever they pull, it works like gangbusters compared to the rest.
The entire affair does remind one of why people trouble themselves to play such games in the first place: to participate and accomplish objectives while embracing a sense of psychological tension that only the player can provide for themselves. This adaptation cannot quite reach that, nor can any movie really ever. (Otherwise, why would we bother having video games?) That key variable, the capacity of the individual, is something that cinema cannot dictate or convey. Although the scenes take on an episodic nature, several of which resemble actual in-game cinematic sequences, the ultimate menace is diluted because, within two hours, the viewer is aware that the story will be finished, plain and simple; your character simply cannot die at any point.
While a vague threat can work wonders virtually, asking the audience to understand these characters and comprehend their situation with equal significance in a condensed period of time puts the entire scenario at a disadvantage. I'm all for a cinematic depiction of a living nightmare, horror that defies logic and reason. The atmosphere, mood, and creatures are there, but the risk is not. Instead, the atmosphere, mood, and creatures are just... there, failing to create a true sensation, spine-chilling or otherwise. Silent Hill cannot quite pull that off in a movie as much as it can in a game.Most game-to-film adaptations are poorly received because they resemble bad movies more than anything else. As a translation of the actual video game experience, 'Silent Hill' makes an honest effort at bleak and abstract horror with a straight face, yet falls short of striking that crucial balance between story and scares to provide the narrative with a smooth momentum and genuine sense of progress. If the studios and filmmakers wish to stay true to form, they might do best to pause, save their progress, and see if they can’t improve their score the next time around.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14326&reviewer=409
originally posted: 04/22/06 15:02:55
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USA
21-Apr-2006 (R)
DVD: 22-Aug-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
31-Aug-2006
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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