Silent Hill on paper should be an easy enough horror film to make. Great location, characters, story, and the creep factor is all there. Somehow though we are now 0-3 on good films based on the games with this years Return To Silent Hill by far being the worst entry yet.
French director Christophe Gans, who directed the 2006 Silent Hill, is back at it this time around though the films are not related at all. We follow James Sunderland, a tortured problematic artist, who after losing the love of his life appears back in Silent Hill based on a feeling that she is still alive. He attempts to piece together clues of what may have happened to his love Mary, the town, and his own life as reality starts to blur even further.
The story is the first part of this films issues though. James, once in Silent Hill, runs from spooky situation to spooky situation, with really nothing in between. The world feels empty in the worst way, nothing feels like a threat, and it all comes across as boring and lackluster. Iconic enemies make their appearance here and are quickly either dumbed down and ignored as if they aren’t a real threat.
It tries so hard too with the story to make it a convoluted plot of what may or may not be real but never seems to embrace it enough to let us in. We get hints of sub plots including the town, a cult, his love Mary and what happened, as well as his life post Mary, but the film just sort of moves on without explaining it in even a simple way.
Visually the movie is hideous too. The green screen is constant and looks beyond cheap. So many effects are just keyed in to where its clear nothing is actually around them. It doesn’t help too that our only two actors here are both acting with the enthusiasm of someone who doesn’t want to be there and hold zero chemistry together.
At 106 minutes the film slogs on. Though the ending tries its best to redeem itself, which is supposedly one of the endings of Silent Hill 2 which this game is based on, the journey there is boring and not done well enough to endure the travel there.
Score :
.5 / 5
