Silent Hill

Silent Hill is a survival horror anthology gaming franchise created by Keiichiro Toyama and Team Silent, a group of staff members within the PlayStation gaming company, Konami. It was one of the first to stray away from the B-movie horror styling of scary video games, and took more of a psychological style to its scares, pacing and even characters, which has become a lot more common and appreciates in today’s horror space. While the games have been split in quality throughout its 19 year lifespan, the first two games (created in 1991 and 2001) are regarded as defining titles for the survival horror genre and were one of the high marks in creating an intense creepy atmosphere. Various adaptations have been connected to Silent Hill, including a 2001 visual novel, several sequels and reimagining’s, and a 2006 feature film (the topic of discussion today). But considering the track record of video game movies, it was not going to end as well as everybody would’ve hoped it would have. In order to discover why her adopted daughter, Sharon (played by Jodelle Ferland) is having nightmares of a place she calls Silent Hill, her mother, Rose Da Silva (played by Radha Mitchell) hopes going to the location will help solve the mystery. After narrowing avoiding hitting a girl on the road to the town, Rose crashes her car and wakes up to find that Sharon is missing and discovers that Silent Hill is far more dangerous than anticipated; with ghouls and demonic creatures coming at night and the town being close to impossible to get through with the thick fog. Rose’s husband, Christopher (played by Sean Bean) tries to go to Silent Hill to find them both with the help of Officer Thomas Gucci (played by Kim Coates), but come across an abandoned town instead, putting them both in separate realms of reality. With the help of a police office named Cybil (played by Laurie Holden), Rose learns the true disturbing story behind this town and how an insane religious cult that is stalking them through the town led by their zealot leader named Christabella (played by Alice Krige) were responsible for the ritualistic sacrifice of a young girl named Alessa Gillespie (who looks a lot like Sharon) for being a witch. Rose must find her daughter and prevent another tragedy occurring in this accursed town. For a video game movie, this movie nails it in terms of its visual and its atmosphere (one of the most defining elements of the games) but misses the mark in terms of turning it into a functioning film. While seen by many as more favorable than others of its kind, it still does quite hit the mark.

The plot of the film seems pretty spot on to what the game was about; a parental figure is searching for their lost child within the remains of this dilapidated town only to discover the true horrors underneath, both in the demon that lurks there and the people that caused this demon to be created. As a baseline for a film, its a pretty good narrative crux with emotional weight as well as plentiful opportunities for scares and atmospheric moments to work as a whole picture, so the pieces are actually all there to make this work.The flow of the movie feels almost unnaturally close to the video game, where the film’s protagonist is going through these situation so clearly and specifically, to the point that it feels like a decision that would be made by a player and all the riddles and puzzles feel like they were pulled directly from the game. This more than likely comes from director, Christophe Gans, who was really impressed with the games and fought hard for the rights in order to convey the same kind of terror he experienced to the rest of the world. While its nice that the movie showed respect for its gaming source and wanted to show off the strengths of the product, there isn’t enough updates or changes made from this transition to make it work. While the synopsis of the game is strong, the actual meat of it was intentionally vague and contradictory by nature to make the player feel more uncomfortable and uncertain of their progress, and that is something that only a game can really get away with (at least in the realms of horror). It’s a game that has five different endings ranging from satisfying to depressing (one literally ends with aliens), and its never made clear which one is 100% canonical, so it wasn’t a game that relied on the credibility of the narrative, rather the emotions felt through it. The movie needed to alter the plot in a way that makes it work in movie format, because as is, the structure is messy, it’s way too long for what the material is, the feelings felt are pretty rushed so they feel hollow, the call-backs to the game are pretty useless, and it all just feels very muddled. This is especially bizarre as the writer for this movie was Roger Avery, who was known for assisting Quentin Tarantino with writing the story for Pulp Fiction, so this is clearly a writer who can make good material, but also make abstract and non-linear material work, so its an odd final result (but considering his other track record for writing and directing, its not too out of the ordinary). It too closely resembles a video-game script that it really changes the pacing and mood of a lot of scenes because the removal of the personal tense in these stories does dramatically alter how they perceive these stories, yet the screenplay isn’t able to translate this problem. It tried so hard to recapture everything about the game that it forgot it needed to function as a movie too; its twists and its pacing between each moment needs to be different because it’s going to feel different watching a movie as oppose to physically playing through it.

The characters operate under a similar format; they need to be treated differently now because this isn’t a game, it’s a movie and its not being treated as one. In the game, the characters were allowed to be rather straight-forward and lacking in detail because they weren’t the focus; the focus was the atmosphere, the location and the emotions felt within that environment. Its one of the few games where an observer-type characters work because as long as the environment can tell the story of the one or many character’s turmoils, they don’t really need to do much else. This doesn’t work like that, these people aren’t inserts anymore, they are characters in a movie, but a lot of them are really bland and not set-up well. Radha Mitchell doesn’t have come across as much outside of the generic worrying mother, which might’ve been passable if everybody else wasn’t as equally underdeveloped. Laurie Holden as the cop literally has nothing set-up about her so it kind of just feels like she’s a plot device, the film gets really boring whenever they cut back to the real world with Sean Bean as outside of a singular trippy idea, it feels like a complete waste of time, and the religious cult just feels like every traditional crazy cult in any other horror flick. The only character that stands out as pretty memorable is the villain; the backstory is legitimately good, its taken from the game but still functions well in this setting, even if the revelation comes way too late and out of nowhere, and how her pain and suffering ties into the other characters and the town really works in this set-up and gives the environment’s design more purpose outside of just for the sake of it. If the other characters had been handled similarly, this could have worked better or even if they were given the same level of a twisted nature. Silent Hill was always more about psychological scares above classic scares, but outside of the villain, nothing is being psychologically tackled with any of the characters . Most of the acting isn’t that impressive either; its not laughably bad, but nothing stands out as memorable and anytime it needs to be serious, it instead comes across as hoaky (especially from the two leads).

The portion of the game that this film nailed was its aesthetic, atmosphere, and production design. This feels like its Silent Hill from how it looks, to how it sounds, even to how it feels. One of the most memorable elements of Silent Hill is how the location looks; the duality between the misty uncertain above-areas and the decrepit, rusty worn-down lower area was always something that people enjoyed, and It feels spot on here. The production design for the town handled by Carol Spier looks appropriate and the hell-like environment feels pretty in-line too. While its not really utilized to its full potential and stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of the split reality situation, but it could be argued that’s more in line with the game’s intent. The cinematography by Dan Laustsen gets some nice shots that feel like they show off the area while also heightening its off-beat element, with strange titled angles and certain fixed shots, its nicely done and shows the area off both above and below in an interesting way. Most of the music returns from the games and they are pieces that are infamously beloved. Composer Akira Yamaoka (who acted as executive producer for this film) did a fantastic job creating music that was haunting and other-worldly but also gritty and rustic in nature, it was brilliant at keeping the player tense and feeling like they were literally stuck in hell, and some of those pieces make a comeback here. While they aren’t used too much, the parts they are do work and are effective and the additions from the movie’s actual composer, Jeff Danna, feel like the match the style enough that its not distracting. For a horror movie, it really isn’t scary at all. On a technical level, the monsters look okay, and it has a decent atmosphere, but not one that works for the scares they’re going for in this. In terms of its effects, they aren’t fantastic, but they don’t look bad either, which results in a balance of CG and make-up to make it look physical but not scary.

For a video game movie, this isn’t one of the worst offenders. There’s usually a balance of adaptations that fail because they either change so much from the game that they become unrecognizable, or they don’t change enough so that there’s no point in even watching them. This movie falls into the latter category; it tried so desperately to mirror the game to a tea that its practically useless to watch this unless you just want to see it on the screen. It’s going to offer nothing different and the pacing, writing and story feel really off because of it. The story isn’t engaging because of how obvious it is and how it never lets the audience figure anything out, the characters are blank shells with no psychological depth to work with, and for a franchise that is known to shake people to their core, this isn’t a scary film in the least. Its visually what people would want to see from this type of movie as the production and visual aspects of this world and even hints of the atmosphere are there, its just not the spirit that the story requires. About as random and pointless as its Pyramid Head cameo, check it out for yourself and see if Silent Hill is a place you want to see come to life.