Silent Hill (2006)

Starring Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates, Tanya Allen, Alice Krige, Jodelle Ferland.
Directed by Christophe Gans.
Screenplay by Roger Avary.
Based on the game created by Konami.
Produced by Samuel Hadida.
Distributed by Tristar Pictures.
127 minutes.

LVJeff's Rating: 5/10

The Movie That Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mound

This review requires a little background. I'm a major fan of the Silent Hill video game series, which I consider to be one of the best examples of atmosphere and immersion in the medium. Rather than jolt a player with sudden shocks, the Silent Hill games try to get under your skin -- the creepiness that comes from isolation and fear of the unknown is very effectively created, and I find these games to be scarier than any recent Hollywood horror movies. The second game of the series, Silent Hill 2, is my personal favorite, adding a haunting story about the oppressiveness of guilt on top of its already well-rendered world of dread.

As a fan, I never wanted to see a Silent Hill movie get made. The filmmaking world wouldn't know how to handle it, just as they haven't figured out exactly how to handle any game-to-movie adaptation. Thus, if a Silent Hill movie came out wrong, it would be a major disservice to a franchise that I feel deserves a lot of respect. I'm already sick of uninformed critics dismissing every video game they hear of as if they were interchangeable, without being able to discern the different qualities among them. Bad video game movies just exacerbate this general ignorance, so I'd just prefer it if they stopped making them all together.

But that's not going to happen, and so it is with deep resignation that I view the inevitable Silent Hill movie. And although it's not nearly as bad as I feared, it does confirm most of my concerns. The movie is preoccupied with re-creations of parts of the games, and these are done well, but only game fans could appreciate that. This is undermined, however, by general weaknesses -- clumsy dialogue, awkward acting, and poor plot coherence, with the story jumping the rails by the climax. It has some effective moments, a few other parts with some potential, and enough bad elements to counteract them -- in other words, this is an average movie, and not what Slient Hill, a standout, resonant game series, deserves.

The potential on display here is what really makes the movie frustrating. Director Christophe Gans shows a definite commitment here to staying faithful to the look and feel of the games while trying something different in terms of approach to a horror movie. It's not a slasher/stalker movie; it opts to employ the games' strategy of creating fear from nightmarish displacement. There's some stuff here to be proud of, really -- the production design is impressive, and much of the sound mix and soundtrack ring true from its source (it includes many of game composer Akira Yamaoka's pieces).

Yet, while this is admirable on a technical level, Gans doesn't go far enough in the right direction. He gives in to the urge to manufacture spectacle, which hurts the mood of fearsome ambiguity. For example, the rather shapeless monsters are much scarier when we can't see them clearly, but there are enough well-lit monster closeups here for us to consider their costume designs. The movie displays a tendency and desire to show off its gruesome creations when it would actually be more perturbing to hold back and not show all of its hand.

The longer the movie goes, the more it indulges in a misplaced lust for gore. A memorable character from the game Silent Hill 2, the aptly named "Pyramid Head," has an appearance here, but the movie makes a rather big, gratuitous show of him. The ending of the movie totally caves in, introducing a large group of people to be victimized in an orgy of bloody disembowelling. This kind of thing has no place to me in Silent Hill, where the lasting impression is one of psychological disturbance. The games actually show how the deepest fears can come from isolation, whether internally or externally created. The movie starts out on the right foot, but then ends on a note of righteous, noisy fury, which ends up creating a shallow sense of catharsis that isn't easily found in the games.

These adaptations suffer from a restrictive sense of literal-mindedness -- give players/fans the references they came to see, and tie them all together with a surface-level story. However, this leaves one with only a short-lived satisfaction at most, and the movies are less than memorable as a result because nothing is done to reproduce emotions (or, in some cases, to produce emotions at all). They need to be approached with a vision that comes from finishing a game and asking what memorable feelings were associated with it. The Silent Hill games are mysteries that probe sadness and mental anguish, and explore how fearsome those negative feelings might seem if they could physically manifest themselves. To me, a perfect Silent Hill movie would've focused on this while using the games' base premise as just that -- a base premise -- re-creations be damned. Alas, I know this is still too much to ask for so, in my ideal world, no one would've ever even bothered.

©Jeffrey Chen, Apr. 23, 2006

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