Silent Hill - Film Review

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Silent Hill begins with a big colorful Tri-Star logo and the opening mandolin trill from the first game. It's a promising sign of things to come: a major studio and an obvious nod to the source material. This is what drives -- and also ultimately sinks -- the movie: it was made for those of us who've played the games.

You'll spend a fair amount of the movie's two hours-plus running time playing "spot the game reference," a sport the filmmakers readily provide with liberal and direct references to the first three games (as any fan knows, Silent Hill 4 isn't canon). It would spoil the fun to list them, but suffice to say, if there's a moment you remember, the odds are that it's represented here.

Direction Christophe Gans' messy, moody Brotherhood of the Wolf is a good indication of what you're in for. He provides a haunting visual interpretation of Silent Hill's worlds, complete with faithful sound design. Scriptwriter Roger Avary does the heavy lifting and eventually crumbles under the weight of trying to make sense of Silent Hill's ponderous non-sense. Which is largely the point of the brilliant games, so Avary is kind of doomed from the start.

But he gives it one hell of a try. He provides a fair bit of backstory and rationale for some of the best game references, and he doesn't jump the shark until well into the third act. So by the time the movie devolves into a bunch of "burn the witch!" silliness that seems to have arrived out of some Monty Python-esque left field, you'll have gotten your money's worth.

When she isn't saddled with some truly dreadful lines, Radha Mitchell does a presentable job with the combination of terror and determination required for our lead character, here a mother who stands in for the father from the first game. The basic premise, a parent separated from a child, is a muscular and efficient way to get our heroine into places a normal person wouldn't be. But instead of the bewildered Harry pummeling things with a pipe, which was a lot of the first game, we watch Mitchell's Rose doing something far less gamey and more sensible: being scared.

Laurie Holden's ill-fated policewoman provides a bit of spunk and firepower, while poor Alice Krige is limited to a late appearance, in which she reminds us how a wonderful actress might be doomed forever to reprisals of her creepy Borg Queen role. It's too bad that she serves as the centerpiece around which Avary's script spins out of control.

But the real star of the movie is Silent Hill itself, which straddles a small town socked in by fog and a wet rusted burned-out version of hell, strewn with hospital equipment, chain link fences, and steel catwalks. Its inhabitants are a delightfully creepy combination of digital and practical effects, many almost entirely unexplained but nevertheless presented prominently. Because, you know, they were in the game.

A game can easily establish dual worlds because you spend your time exploring and learning the layout of locations. The movie effectively manages this by having a sort of parallel storyline, with Sean Bean doing fairly undramatic stuff like Googling, calling directory assistance, and rifling through boxes of files.

Like most horror movies, Silent Hill falls apart completely before it ends. The good news is that you can't blame the games for the parts that don't work. Because when Silent Hill is firing on all cylinders, it's driven by the games and presented to those of us who've played them. Gans and Avary have done a great job of giving us something exciting, unsettling, and faithful. Unfortunately, there's that small matter of the rest of the world who isn't going to know what the hell is going on and will simply shake its head and mutter about how little sense these silly games make.