Joel on Film

In its best moments, Return to Silent Hill entirely eschews the impression that it’s based, however loosely, upon a video game. That—to be quick on the mark and not to infuriate players and fans of video games—isn’t necessarily meant to be a backhanded compliment at the expense of the source material here, which certainly has to be one of the more beloved and popular horror sequels in the history of the gaming artform. It’s simply to say that co-writer/director Christophe Gans, up to a point, focuses upon what makes this story sad and nightmarish, right down to its attitude and atmosphere.

The video game series, of course, is Silent Hill, which is also the name of the small Maine town in which those games were set, where events of a supernatural or occultic nature often occur. Gans is no stranger to film adaptations of these games, having adapted the first one into a movie nearly 20 years ago, and that one, obviously titled Silent Hill, is likely high on the list of actually good game adaptations. So many of the less successful ones, of which there are far too many to count, rely on some translation of their mission-oriented functionality that it was a relief to see a movie avoid that entirely in favor of the atmosphere the filmmaker attempts, which occasionally surprising success, to replicate here.

That it comes 20 years after the first film and more than 13 years after a frankly laughable sequel (2012’s Silent Hill: Revelation, which seemed to exist entirely for its 3D presentation) means that Gans has been given a surprising opportunity to right the ship in some way. The pieces are certainly there for a far more effective attempt, because we fully believe and even become involved in the relationship at the movie’s center: It’s between James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) and Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson), who Meet Cute when he accidentally causes her to miss a bus headed out of town. Their changed plans fuel a romance and, eventually, a marriage.

The actual plot takes place years later, when the estranged couple has separated and Mary seems to have sent him a letter beckoning him back to Silent Hill. There, he finds a desolate wasteland, ravaged by some sort of illness and a related destruction that has covered the town in ash. The question becomes whether Mary stayed there and is now among the infected.

That narrative, on the face of it, is more than enough to keep our interest, because even with the few scenes between them, Irvine and Anderson sell us on the bond between the two, as well as the void left in the wake of their separation. A puzzle develops as James wanders through Silent Hill on his search-and-rescue attempt, meeting several strangers in the process but too blinded by grief and worry to realize what’s really going on. Two of those strangers are women named Maria and Angela, and it would probably be spoiling a little too much to specify which actress plays them.

The important thing, at least until the genre elements overtake the story and the puzzle starts to move in a circular fashion, is that they remind James of a certain someone, as does a girl played by Evie Templeton. Once the horror-movie imagery is introduced, though, it feels like a bit of a distraction from the human story. This doesn’t matter too much when the imagery, such as the gnarly physical form that combines James’ grief and worry into a giant and many-legged ghoul, is directly connected to the pieces of story that matter.

Elsewhere, though, we have some detours involving a violent man named Eddie (Pearse Egan) and another horror figure with a pyramid-shaped box for a head, all of which bring the proceedings to a grinding halt so that Gans and co-screenwriters Sandra Vo-Anh and Will Schneider can delay the revelations in favor of some routine horror sequences. Return to Silent Hill undoubtedly bounces the movie series back from the brink of irrelevance, but it doesn’t quite come together as cohesive experience.

Rating: **½ (out of ****)