4 out of 5

Director: Christopher Gans

Is Silent Hill a great movie?  No.  Christopher Gans forgets to wring sensible reactions to events from his actors and slips unevenly between game tribute shots and genre shots to give the film a solid feel, and Roger Avary’s script delivers some dunderhead lines that have no business being sputtered when shit hits the fan in quite the way it does in SH.  Then the union of the writer and director is brought to life by at least 5 different special effects teams who can’t help but falter under CGI burdens here and there to not quite make things as terrifying or dirty as they should be.  And yet, Silent Hill is not only one of the best video game adaptations to date, but is also a unique and bold vision, thanks to the filmmakers’ appreciation of the source material and desire to bring it to screen thematically intact.

While anyone who has gotten addicted to any individual entry in the SH series can attest, it’s incredibly involving, and has a rich, creepy story abundant with elements to ponder and study, and visuals which even in the Playstation 1 era of games were (and still are) a sight.  While one might call the experience ‘cinematic,’ actually bringing it to screen would be a tougher chore, as part of the charm of the game is the purposeful open-endedness of the concept.  It also has the boon of, well, being a game, where we automatically can accept certain elements more readily than we might on screen.  Overall, though, the series is about a town called Silent Hill, which can be anywhere, which doesn’t quite exist on this plane, and is a place where our secrets and fears have physical manifestation.  This is explored character by character in the games, slowly dropping pieces about how things might’ve come to be while whichever character you control searches for something they’ve lost…  Gans and Avary’s Silent Hill spins up an appropriate intro of young Jodelle Ferland’s repeated nightmares of this town of which she’s never heard causing her mother – Radha Mitchell – to seek out Silent Hill in the hopes of quelling her daughter’s dreams.  They arrive, her daughter goes missing, and suddenly they’re stuck in the town, roads out blocked off or ruined, alarms warning of pitches into blackness when suddenly worse-than-Lovecraftians horrors come out to play.  And how does this tie to the coal fires which reputedly burn underneath the town?  Or to the cult and the church in which they gather and pray when the bells go off?  And when Sean Bean, the husband, comes following in his family’s trail – why can he not seem to find them when, for all intents and purposes, he’s only a few steps behind?  Bearing in mind the issues I mention above, there’s so much visual and subtextual wonder in Silent Hill that it’s a fascinating view beyond its problems.  Getting original game composer Akira Yamaoka to provide tunes and executive produce also seems to keep things grounded in the murky, paced world of Silent Hill, untainted by larger studio needs to provide a “point” to everything… Though we do get a more focused explanation than the games offer, it still maintains the ghostly slightly-off feeling of the series.  Be warned that there is some ghastly violence committed here, but it is so original in design and tied to the tone that one doesn’t view it as gore for gore’s sake.

I will say the flick has some pluses and minuses to an HD translation, if that’s how you’re viewing it – the sharpening of everything actually helps the CGI scenes, all of the elements at least layered with the same crispness so the organic elements don’t stick out as much, but on the other hand, the widescreen fog shots will never look all that great (good idea, but the shots stick out), and along with that crispness comes the downside of cleaning it up a bit too much, where grit and dirt and blood now clearly looks like makeup.

I’ll fully admit to the film’s flaws.  However, it’s also a movie I’ve rewatched several times, and actually found more rewarding as I gain distance from the game, able to evaluate the film of its own substantial merits, and it deserves more than a 3-star average rating for being such a dedicated vision, if executed with some – perhaps unavoidable – difficulties.