Film Review - Return to Silent Hill
Images courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment.
There are few horror series as stubbornly resistant to explanation as the Silent Hill series. The games’ power lies not in what they reveal, but in what they withhold: the sense that every character is speaking around something unspeakable, that every monster is more emotional residue rather than something to be merely beaten. Return to Silent Hill arrives with the promise of resurrecting that atmosphere for the screen. Instead, it performs a kind of cinematic autopsy, dissecting the mystery until nothing but a sliver of the franchise’s aesthetic remains.
Christophe Gans, returning to the franchise he first brought to the silver screen in 2006, treats the source material - the much-revered second game in the series - less as a psychological labyrinth and more as a checklist of recognisable moments. James Sunderland’s journey back to the fog-choked town - prompted, once again, by a letter from his dead wife - is faithfully reproduced in rough outline but fundamentally altered in spirit. Where the game allowed ambiguity to fester, the film rushes to simplify and dull nearly everything about the experience. Dialogue now fills every moment in between the (admittedly visually cool) spooky monster chase scenes, and the town of Silent Hill begins to feel not so… silent.
The problem is not that Return to Silent Hill misunderstands the plot of Silent Hill 2. It misunderstands its grammar. In the game, language is broken, indirect, evasive; characters speak as though they are afraid of their own thoughts. Gans replaces this with dialogue that feels less cryptic and more craptastic, with fan favourites B-plots like Eddie and the nurses reduced to mere minutes of screentime. Trauma becomes something to articulate rather than something to wrestle with, subtext becomes text, and once that happens, Silent Hill ceases to feel like a place where meaning is unstable. It becomes merely a bad spooky place where bad spooky things happen.
There are moments when the film gestures toward the ineffable. A long shot of James wandering through empty streets, swallowed by fog, briefly recalls the existential loneliness that defined the games, and brief hints at the Lynchian nightmare psychology tease something worth unravelling. Creature designs decently convey the grotesque poetry of the original monsters, but these flashes of insight are buried beneath an avalanche of exposition, uneven pacing, and visual effects that frequently oscillate between striking and synthetic. As a result, the town ends up feeling less like a psychological purgatory than a well-funded haunted house.
Through all of this, what ultimately makes Return to Silent Hill so dispiriting is its anxiety about audience comprehension. The film seems terrified that viewers might miss something, so it explains everything, especially as it introduces new pieces of the puzzle that don’t quite fit with those that already exist. In doing so, it erases the very conditions that made Silent Hill 2 so meaningful to so many people - that despite its hard-to-decipher plot, personal interpretations and projections shape the game to the player, much like the town itself reshapes around those lost in it. Horror, at its most existentially terrifying, is not about answers; it is about the discomfort of not having them. In trying to return to Silent Hill, the film loses its way before it even arrives.
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Return to Silent Hill is screening in select cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.