Return to Silent Hill review
Don’t.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Return to Silent Hill
Directed by Christophe Gans
Written by Christophe Gans, Sandra Vo-Anh and Will Schneider
Starring Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson, Evie Templeton, Robert Strange, Nicola Alexis and Pearse Egan
Return to Silent Hill Review
The Silent Hill franchise is as strong as ever in the video game world. The well-received and financially successful Silent Hill f hit consoles just this past September. An acclaimed remake of Silent Hill 2 was released just one year prior on PlayStation 5. It made its way to Xbox two months ago. The latter is of the most relevance to this third attempt to bring the video game franchise into the movie sphere. Return to Silent Hill is an adaptation of Silent Hill 2.
The first two attempts to bring the series to the screen can best be described as a mixed bag. Some people have an affinity for the first film. It may as well be Shakespeare compared to the second. Both were successful at the box office…so it makes sense they keep trying to get it right. Or at least…keep the box office returns coming. With the video game series most celebrated entry as the basis for this attempt…what could go wrong?
A lot. It turns out.
Return to Silent Hill comes from the same director, Christophe Gans, of the first Silent Hill movie. It’s rare to see someone take a second swing two decades later…but it speaks to Gans’ love of the series. Maybe he loves it a little too much. Return to Silent Hill isn’t just caught in the shadow of the popular game it adapts…it’s utterly trapped inside it. This is a tough thing to navigate. A faithful adaptation is something that, on paper, should excite fans of the game. But movies aren’t video games. Return to Silent Hill shows why.
I’m not breaking news by stating that the best parts of video games…the most necessary parts…are the parts you control. It’s what separates games from movies. If you just string together cutscenes within a game…you wouldn’t have a very good game. You wouldn’t have a very good movie either. Even if you are completely faithful to the look and feel of those cutscenes. Which is the case with Return to Silent Hill. Cutscenes don’t contain the exploration and action that the parts a player controls do. Those are the exciting parts.
Silent Hill 2 has a decent enough story about grief, guilt and a mystery that the main character doesn’t really want to solve. What makes it work is the player controlled discovery of lore and tense scenes of survival. That’s a key right there. Your survival. The evil things are coming to kill you. You’re in control of your own fate. Now…that’s something that every movie has to deal with. You are never in control of the characters a film asks you to empathize with and care about. That’s why movies can’t just be a greatest hits of cutscenes from a video game. They need to offer something more. Return to Silent Hill doesn’t.
It’s both a compliment and the main issue that the movie looks so much like a video game. Several moments are recreated in a way that they look spot on. That’s what we want though…right? When we’re teenagers who haven’t seen enough movies to have fully grasped how they work. Why can’t they just make a Resident Evil movie that recreates Resident Evil 2? Because they shouldn’t. Because Resident Evil 2 exists. Go play it. They even made a great updated remake that you can get your hands on. Silent Hill 2 already exists too. Go play it. Because as a movie…Silent Hill 2 makes for a great video game.
Digital effects don’t help the cause here either. It’s not even that the effects look terrible…it’s that they look like a video game. The whole movie strives to recreate everything you remember about the game. It succeeds. Which is a large part of why it fails. I’ll admit, when the movie shows us the opening spot of the game…I was impressed with it. It evoked fond memories and got me excited about the care that went into recreating Silent Hill in movie form. That feeling faded more and more the more the movie showed. None of it feels real. Which, for narrative reasons we won’t get into…is actually not the worst choice. The problem is that you have to believe it is real in a movie or how are you going to connect to any of it?
The answer is that you won’t. The magic of video games is an unmatched level of immersion. You are a part of the story…so the story doesn’t have to work as hard to pull you in or…make sense. Movies aren’t video games. They have to work for that immersion. Return to Silent Hill succeeds in making a movie that looks like Silent Hill 2. It fails to make you feel much of anything about it.
Scare Value
I skipped any discussion of the actual story of Return to Silent Hill. People who have played Silent Hill 2 already know it beat by beat. For those who don’t…it’s about a troubled man who returns to Silent Hill in search of his ex-girlfriend. He finds the town abandoned, full of monsters and shrouded in fog and ash. Sounds like it would make for a pretty good video game, doesn’t it? It does. Go play that.
1.5/5
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