Return To Silent Hill

Bluesky

Silent Hill has its origins in a video game franchise that's seen something of the order of 20 games produced by almost as many developers. While the games go back to 1999, Return To Silent Hill is the third film and comes 20 years after the first adaptation. The size and scope of the parallel franchise is complex enough. The second film was a direct sequel to the first, taking elements of the third videogame, and versa this third film takes elements of the second game and its remake.

If it seems hard to square these influences, we'll be circling back to them. While Silent Hill is as mysterious a space as the Bermuda Triangle, the way this film interacts with the canon of the videogames would be enough to make any fan cross.

Christophe Gans defied the traditionally low expectations of videogame movies with the first film. Some may know him better for the riotous adventure Brotherhood Of The Wolf which owes debts to Kung Fu, Conan Doyle. It remains an astonishingly ambitious bit of work, and that makes this all the more disappointing.

Our protagonist James Sunderland starts on a winding road in a convertible Mustang, and no amount of set dressing can hide that it's far more of Old Europe than New England. He'll eventually leave it behind, and from that point the film is both literally and figuratively pedestrian. Jeremy Irvine's been unable to follow-up his breakthrough in War Horse with much, across flashbacks and various horror sequences he's given plenty to do here. Acting opposite a number of others who are playing doubled or more complex roles he's a point of solidity in often artificial surroundings.

He's also frequently anchor to the camera, the odd dutch angle is less frustrating than sequences where we're given a first person view. There are a few moments that are incredibly well constructed, a stacked set of reflections from knife and mirror is sharper than almost anything else on display.

That's more than the uneasy distortions of Silent Hill, a town at once in the Northeastern United States but due to production realities also in Serbia and CGI. A large number of effects firms have put in credible effort, but it's not hard to blame small budgets and short timescales for angular dissonance that suggests old-fashioned Full Motion Video games. That might be an unkindness, the uncanny might be purposeful invocation of an even earlier generation of games, but it's one of several places where issues of texture are not felt as deliberate.

Hannah Emily Anderson and Eve Macklin aren't strangers to genre, and young Evie Templeton joins a small set of actors who have played the same character in a videogame and its adaptation (in that order). There are plenty of others around, but so many are obfuscated by some combination of pixels and prosthesis that it'd be hard to single anyone out.

There's a similar issue with scripting. Gans contributes, as do writers for the videogame(s), Sandra Vo-An has written with Gans on his 2014 adaptation of Beauty And The Beast, and William Josef Schneider wrote for the similarly complicated franchise outpost of 2024's version of The Crow. The various influences here include a game mechanic, radio interference, that seems to be infrequently used unless you pay very close attention at the end.

Sound is one of the better elements. Akira Yamaoka composes, as he has done since that first game. Across multiple characters, developers, publishers, even mediums, he's one of the more consistent elements of the franchise and completionists will have another album to purchase from this. Visually, Pablo Rosso has lensed plenty of horror, including the [Rec] films. It's that sense of repetition that probably most counts against Return To Silent Hill. There's little new here, and even less fresh. The realities of production mean that this feels quite cheap in places, and while special effects continue to advance ,endless clipping of budgets would leave scenery looking wobbly even without anyone chewing on it.

There are, inevitably, other versions of this story. The videogame and its remake have multiple endings, and in a way so does this. It's got elements drawn from the games, though fans might have to console themselves that the film could have made worse choices. No dogs behind the curtain here, but plenty to bitch about.

Many seeing this won't be familiar with the games, so instead its weaknesses as a film will be the issue. It's there that Return To Silent Hill suffers most. If you've not been there already there's not much to recommend a visit, and if you have been it's not just nostalgia that'll give you the sense that it's not as good as it used to be.

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