“Sharon!”
I’ve never played any of the Silent Hill games, but if you asked me what properties were well-suited for film adaptation, I’d still put Silent Hill near the top of the list. It’s creepy minimalism and shocking imagery make it a good candidate for an intimate, claustrophobic thriller that ratchets up the intensity as it goes along. Right? Wrong, because apparently there’s a shit-ton of mythology and backstory, all of which the Silent Hill film feels the need to jam into 125 unearned minutes.
For a movie in which our protagonist has a horrific encounter with an unnamable evil about every ten minutes, Silent Hill is agonizingly, almost aggressively slow-paced. Which is weird, because it gets off to a solid enough start, with Rose (Radha Mitchell) and her husband Chris (Sean Bean, not even attempting an American accent) frantically searching for their daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland, who played one of the murderous Buckners in The Cabin in the Woods), who has sleepwalked to the edge of a quarry. After that solid opening, though, the film takes a shit, because Sharon starts yelling the words “Silent Hill” over and over, which is just incredibly lazy exposition. Rose decides to take Sharon to the titular town in West Virginia, in order to…I don’t know, jog her memory? (Side note: are the names Rose and Sharon inspired by Rose of Sharon Joad? Because if so, that makes this the weirdest Grapes of Wrath reference ever.)
So obviously, once they reach Silent Hill everything goes to shit. Rose gets in a car accident and blacks out, and when she wakes up Sharon is gone. Rose makes her way into town to find her daughter, joined by a cop named Cybil Bennett, played by The Walking Dead‘s Laurie Holden (also, what’s up with these names: Cybil and Sharon? That’s the female equivalent of naming your son Henry).
Radha Mitchell remains a nonentity throughout Silent Hill (she even wears her cell phone on a lanyard, so she won’t lose it at all the makeout parties she won’t be invited to), but Holden actually acquits herself nicely here. She’s well-cast as a motorcycle cop, and with her short hair, leather gloves, and use of handcuffs, she has a real dominatrix vibe that works really well for her. Bennett is by far the most likable, interesting character in Silent Hill, but that’s not saying much. The film is bogged down with way too many useless characters and subplots.
The worst offender is Rose’s husband Chris, who spends most of the move looking for her. He teams up with Detective Tom Gucci, played by Kim Coates doing an Elias Koteas impression. All this team manages to do is pad out the film’s running time, but hear me out here: this movie might actually be better if it were longer.
By which I mean, it should be a miniseries. Six episodes, tops, but the story that director Christophe Gans and write Roger Avary (who has an Oscar for co-writing Pulp goddamn Fiction, so it’s like, come on, man, get your shit together). Let this be the slow-burn that it clearly wants to be. As it is, Silent Hill feels incredibly rushed, in a hurry to hammer the audience with exposition and throw in references to the game series.
Not all of this is a shit-show, mind you. There are some sequences here that I actually enjoyed. Pyramid Head is the franchise’s dumbest and coolest character, and his appearance here is suitably frightening, even if the film doesn’t quite know what to do with him, even if his arrival is one of the film’s scariest scenes. Silent Hill‘s best sequence by far, though, is Rose’s confrontation with a group of faceless, buxom nurses, who can only move when she shines her light on them. As Rose maneuvers through the not-quite-motionless nurses, the film achieves real tension, the kind it can’t achieve elsewhere thanks to the eyeroll-inducing monologues and desensitizing images of violence.
Seriously, this movie is so graphic at times that it gets downright dumb. It’s the same reason that Hellraiser, or any Clive Barker property, has become so dated and corny: over-the-top violence and ghoulishness that threatens at all times to become self-parody. It’s a level of gore that only appeals to fans of Rob Zombie films, likely high schoolers with a remedial sense of what makes things scary, and confuse gore with horror. “And then she gets held up by barbed wire! And then the barbed wire rips her guts out! And then there’s blood everywhere! And, and, and then it rips her in half! Blargh!”
There’s also a dumb through-line about a quasi-religious cult that has taken over Silent Hill and wants to sacrifice Sharon for…something (look, I know I’m wrong about this, but there is no way I’m watching it again). It’s never made clear, and the film makes the mistake of introducing a villain about an hour and twenty minutes in, in the form of Christabella, played by Alice Krige, and OH MY GOD I do not care about any of this goddam backstory. Silent Hill has so much on its mind and doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on any of the threads it’s dangling. Also, the dialogue sucks. One line is “Look at me: I’m burning,” so you know what, Roger Avary, return your Oscar at your earliest convenience. A solid two thirds of dialogue spoke by Rose or Chris is “Sharon!” (Hence the lead quote.) Characters address each other by name in Silent Hill more than I’ve ever seen in real life.
Adapting video games into movies is notoriously difficult. The success rate hovers somewhere around zero percent. But with the talent involved, you’d expect Silent Hill to be better – or at least better than the expository, glacial, nonsensical mess that it is. As shitty as it is to say this, the high bar for video game adaptations to hurdle is Mortal Kombat. All I want is for a goddamn movie to be better than Mortal Kombat.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead (2004)
10/2: The Exorcist
10/3: Pontypool
10/4: Hocus Pocus
10/5: The Orphanage
10/6: Rosemary’s Baby
10/7: Alien
10/8: Scream series
10/9: Scream series
10/10: Cujo
10/11: The Cabin in the Woods
10/12: Pulse
10/13: The Babadook
10/14: Friday the 13th
10/15: The Last House on the Left (both versions)
10/16: The Thing (both versions)
10/17: Little Shop of Horrors
10/18: Hush
10/19: Silent Hill
10/20: The Shining
10/21: Funny Games (2007)
10/22: Evil Dead series
10/23: Evil Dead series
10/24: The Mist
10/25: The Ninth Gate
10/26: The Fly
10/27: A Nightmare on Elm Street
10/28: The Nightmare Before Christmas
10/29: 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later
10/30: It
10/31: Halloween (either version)
About Author
