‘Return to Silent Hill’ Review: Manifestation Of Awful

It seems video game adaptations are reverting to the poor quality they are known for after numerous financial successes in the medium, as Christophe Gans’ Return to Silent Hill is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in the 21 years I’ve been alive.

This review contains spoilers for Return to Silent Hill.

Return to Silent Hill is an adaptation of the wildly successful 2001 video game, Silent Hill 2; however, fans expecting to see a film that is faithful to the iconic horror experience will be severely disappointed, as this looks like Silent Hill 2, but holds not an ounce of the substance that made that game so special, leaving this adaptation to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Return to Silent Hill follows a depressed painter named James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), who gets a letter from his former girlfriend, Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), telling him to meet her at their “special place”, the town of Silent Hill. While not all adaptations must be a 1:1 of their source material, when an adaptation makes so many drastic changes to the original, it becomes something entirely its own, and unfortunately, that’s the case with this film.

Some of the many changes to the story are that Mary is actually alive in this adaptation and not dead, that Silent Hill is a place where James and Mary lived together, and that Mary’s father was the leader of a cult that worshipped her. None of these aspects were in the game and completely changed what was a story about a man coming to terms with murdering his sick wife into a man being forced to kill his girlfriend after she didn’t leave the cult that was poisoning her, it completely removes all the blame from James and drastically changes the themes of guilt.

Amongst the awful changes, we actually get to see James and Mary’s relationship and spend a significant amount of time with them during the opening 15 minutes and numerous flashbacks. The problem with this is that Irvine and Anderson have absolutely zero chemistry with one another, and the fact that all of the flashbacks featuring their relationship are always in the middle of a high-tension sequence, neutering all the momentum the story was building up. Due to this, the entire 106-minute runtime feels like watching a film on cable television, as the pacing is so stop-and-go with these horrendous flashbacks that truly add nothing to the film.

Not only does the pacing make the film feel excruciatingly long, but every scene looks so digital to the point where everything looks fake. I can sort of commend the production designer Felicity Abbott for making the world look similar to the video game, aside from the overabundance of abysmal-looking CGI. The film also treats its audience like complete idiots, as everything is explained to you directly as much as a Netflix original.

Throughout the film, James encounters three women in the town of Silent Hill, all resembling his missing girlfriend. During one of the numerous sequences of James losing his sanity, the audience is quite literally shown a tombstone that says Mary Laura Maria Angela Crane. Laura, Maria, and Angela were the women who clearly resembled Mary that James encountered; anybody with good vision could see that they were played by the same actress, except for Laura, as she is a child. Among many of the other manifestations of his trauma, James runs into the iconic villain Pyramid Head, who is a manifestation of his rage. However, Gans later feels the need to state the obvious by having a shot of the camera dollying into the shaped monster’s mask, revealing James to be behind it. If you do not trust your audience to understand your film, how do you expect any of them to be captivated by it?

As somebody who is a big fan of the Silent Hill video game series, this was a complete and utter failure on all fronts, as the story and characters I love were butchered like a pig in a slaughterhouse, and ultimately, it leads to my problem with video game adaptations. Studios constantly take iconic games loved by fans and create utter trash that slightly resembles their counterparts to make a quick buck, and I’m sick of it.

Return to Silent Hill was directed by Christophe Gans and written by Sandra Vo-Anh, Will Schneider, and Gans based on Silent Hill 2 by Konami. The film stars Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson, Evie Templeton, Pearse Egan, Nicola Alexis, Emily Carding, and Robert Strange. 

Return to Silent Hill was released in theaters on January 23 by Cineverse’s Bloody Disgusting & Iconic Events Releasing. The film is now available on digital. 

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