Return to Silent Hill (15)

Director: Christophe Gans
Screenplay: Christophe Gans, Hiroyuki Owaku, William Josef Schneider

Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson, Robert Strange
Running time: 106 minutes

Cinema

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Review: Dave Stephens

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When it comes to horror gaming brands, most people are aware of Resident Evil and the many different incarnations that it continues to go through, especially with a new film and game coming out this very year. Compared to RE’s rockstar brashness and party boy rock-punching, Silent Hill is the weird, quiet brother who stands in the corner and thinks of ways to make your skin crawl with fleshy golems, festering buildings, and radio static. The first Silent Hill film was twenty years ago (!!) and had a surprisingly strong cast with Sean Bean, Radha Mitchell, Laurie Holden, and Alice Krige. It was directed by Christophe Ganes, (who also made the wonderful Brotherhood of the Wolf), declaring himself a massive fan of the series. Visually, it was spot-on, not only matching the disturbing visuals of the games but also calling back to the grimy imagery of 90s urban horror like Seven and Jacob’s Ladder. Despite some jaw-droppingly audacious scenes (Pyramid Head strips and completely flays a woman on the steps of a church!), it wasn’t a hit with critics but made enough money and fan appreciation to (eventually) lead to a sequel. However, 2012’s Silent Hill: Revelation was an absolute bust for various reasons, including the fact that Gans was not involved, and the plot became a nonsensical (and slightly dull) mishmash of repeated themes and plot strands. But here we are again, and Gans is back at the helm. Rather than another amalgamation of several games and ideas, this Return is actually a fairly direct adaptation of the “Silent Hill 2” game. So, is it something to shout about, or should it have kept its mouth shut?

 

The film starts with James Sunderland (played by Jeremy Irvine from Baghead) doing everything humanly possible to come across like a douchebag (speeding, smoking dope, playing soft rock, etc) until he (nearly literally) runs into Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson from Jigsaw and What Keeps You Alive). She turns out to be the love of his life… and this turns out to be a drunken flashback. In the present, James is a struggling alcoholic painter who has lost touch with Mary and is pestered by out-of-office calls from his therapist to sober himself up… because that’s just what therapists do, apparently. Must cost a fortune. After reaching his city flat, he finds a mysterious note from Mary, enticing him to join her in the vacation hotspot of Silent Hill for reconciliation. Once he gets there, he finds the once-thriving lakeside town in a terrible state. Grey ash is falling from the sky and coating the buildings in sooty snow. Somewhat more alarmingly, the population has mostly vanished, with only a few human stragglers hindering James’s search for Mary. Significantly more alarming are the armless, fleshy mannequins that spew black acid all over unlucky recipients. But how much of this is real and how much of this is a figment of James’s tortured psyche? And why is it happening to him?

 

It's difficult to understand the idea and intention behind this project. On one hand, it is occasionally gorgeous to look at, has the requisite grotesque imagery you’d expect, and is extremely faithful to its source material. The visual authenticity is completely on-point. In the first half, the locations are exactly the same as those in the game (the bus-stop, the hotel, the hospital, etc), even to the point of corridor layouts, graffiti details, and blocked streets. On the other hand, well, we’ll get to that. Who is its target audience though? Judging by our screening, the audience seemed to be mostly middle-aged gamers. The thing is, with the plot and visuals being so close to the “Silent Hill 2” game (original and recent remake), it makes it hard to see why anybody who has played that would want to see this. Is it to see Pyramid Head, the Faceless Nurses, and the other grim monsters being physically realised again? To its credit, a lot of the SFX is created without CGI overload and mostly with physical media. But if you’re not familiar with Silent Hill (movies or games), you are truly going to be left befuddled and underwhelmed by the final act and the conclusion to the “mystery”.

 

To get some of the positives into the light of day, the mannequins, the nurses, Pyramid Head (and a few others) are nicely realised in this grim landscape. If you have any knowledge or love for the games (or previous movies), you’ll get a tingle down your spine once the siren starts to sound. The surroundings go from ash-grey to rust-red, “rot” spreads across the floors and walls, and juddering entities start to close in. Perfect. And whoever had input into giving the mutant insects a bit of a glow-over… Bravo! Give them a raise. Now the ravenous cockroaches have been given little human mouths that scream, and the scene where they flood against a glass door is pure nightmare fuel. Something not present before in the franchise. You can see the love and appreciation for the source material that Gans has injected into these sequences. The trouble is that these dribble-worthy moments make up very little of the 1hr 46min running time, and there’s a lot of other stuff which is not nearly so effective. Something that a lot of mainstream critics have gleefully used to hammer this potentially niche horror into the ground.

 

It’s important to note that this Return is in no way connected to, nor a continuation of, the earlier films. It is an adaptation of Silent Hill 2 and is standalone from that perspective. Which makes it all the more puzzling as to how the central premise is muffed up by some added plot details. Beyond the logic puzzles and monster-bashing of the game, the plot is basically an exploration of grief, guilt, and mental health (No. Really. There’s a perfectly rational reason for bludgeoning nurses around the head with a crowbar). There are genuinely disturbing elements to the story, but in Return, somewhere in the pre-production, somebody decided that they had to shoehorn an unexplained Rosemary’s Baby-like cult into the mix to complicate things. Yes, there is an underlying diabolical Order referenced in the source material, but not like this. Here it is completely pointless, totally unnecessary, adds nothing to the plot, and… unforgivably… dilutes the mature themes at play. Instead of a tragic play on mortality, it spins out some of the narrative into a weird blood-sucking sub-plot that makes no sense whatsoever. Such a shame. The frequent flashbacks cause even more confusion and the time-wasting scenes with the therapist just smack of padding and desperation.

 

A lot of this wouldn’t matter if the screenplay were of better quality. Unfortunately, the cast is made to spout jilted dialogue that is either lifted wholesale from the games or feels like it has been written by AI. Seriously, chucking in the occasional F-bomb doesn’t make it “grown-up” when the leads have to speak soapy dialogue that Eastenders would throw out for being too hammy! You can get away with that type of stuff in a game during a cut-scene, but you don’t have the luxury of a “skip” button in the cinema! Kudos to Irvine and Anderson for playing it so straight and committing to their parts, especially with Anderson playing several roles. Irvine gives it a go and summons up some chutzpah in some scenes, but in the later acts, he glowers like Jack Torrance with a migraine for no clear reason. Some character cameos are tossed in, seemingly just to wink at the gamers in the audience (because “Eddie” throwing up will mean nothing to anybody else), rather than progress the plot or perform any other purpose.

 

For all the scenes that show promise and deliver some creepy chills (Pyramid Head vs a hideous spider-corpse, the room full of frozen nurses, etc), there are dull moments that just spin wheels and lead to the disappointing conclusion. Even though he dominates the poster (and game), Pyramid Head is woefully underused in the film, only turning up in two sequences, one of which throws away his significance to the plot in the most perfunctory manner. If that’s not enough, the story limps to an unsatisfying climax, which is a total cop-out and makes no sense whatsoever, although it’s ambiguous enough for some people to link it to one of the multiple endings in the game.

 

And yes, we do keep banging on about the game, but when it’s entwined so closely with the story and visuals, it’s hard not to. So, it’s a shame that what works in one medium has not translated into movie bravado. It’s almost as if the film has been made for people who were intrigued by the setup, but just couldn’t be arsed to press a few buttons, push their joystick (steady!), and work out a few conundrums to progress the story. And yet, Gans did such a better job with the same material in the original 2006 film. If you’ve seen that, you might find yourself longing for the gothic grandeur of that movie and wishing for some of the more needlessly gory moments, which are mostly missing from this version. It’s worth noting that, along with many other games, there’s a mountain of material in comics, books, and novels for this franchise. Judging by the immediate reception to this movie, a follow-up is unlikely, but don’t be surprised if the streaming channels start to sniff around…