Return to Silent Hill is a film too under-resourced to compare with the video game

Silent Hill's cinematic destiny is truly strange, full of shadowy areas and seemingly incoherent events that perhaps blend well with the very essence of the saga. So much so that the third cinematic title linked to the franchise, which is based on the second game in the series (the one almost unanimously considered the best ever made by Konami) alludes with its title not only to the return to the town that gives the game its name, but also to the prodigal son Christophe Gans, who directed the first film in 2006.

Twenty years later, with a middle chapter that brought back some of the original cast but with a different director getting lost in the labyrinth of its own plot, the operation appears as a bizarre new beginning, attempting an approach quite faithful to the original video game. We thus follow in the footsteps of one of the central characters of the 2001 video game, a painter named James (Jeremy Irvine) who meets a mysterious, beautiful girl named Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) on the opposite shore of the lake that borders Silent Hill.

The Bizarre New Return of Silent Hill to Cinema

The story between the two is the only happy and bright memory in a film that attempts to recreate the sinister, foggy, sometimes hellish atmospheres of the original title, much of whose charm lay precisely in creating a palpable mood in its disquiet, combining the exploration of a Silent Hill covered in ash with Akira Yamaoka's music, here reprised in a soundtrack that even in its tracks evokes the somewhat melancholic, somewhat depressed sounds of the early 2000s.

The beginning of the film is in fact a flashback: in the present, many characters urge James to accept Mary's disappearance, but after receiving a mysterious letter in which she asks him to return, James drives his Mustang back to Silent Hill, finding the city deserted and covered in a rain of ash. In search of Mary, James soon encounters monsters very familiar to players of old, including the Pyramid Man who already graces the film's poster. More than a horror, as it rarely scares, Return to Silent Hill aims to be a psychological thriller about a man besieged by memories of the past, by monsters of the present, and by agonizing headaches that seem to be triggered by strange sounds and music that herald the arrival of the most sinister creatures lurking in Silent Hill.

At the core of the film, then, is a re-elaboration that never deviates in content from the original game, guiding the viewer through the exploration of the town in its iconic horror locations (the abandoned hospital, the lakeside hotel, the underground passages and streets whose names are obvious nods to the past) while James recounts like a rosary the memories of a relationship he seems to recall only in fragments. The protagonists who served as Virgil and Charon to the main character in the game are also reproduced with remarkable fidelity, even in their clothing (even where it seriously minimizes the verisimilitude of the story): the small and unsettling Laura (Evie Templeton), the shadowy Angela, the extroverted Maria.

It's not so difficult to understand where the film is going, even for those who haven't played it: in those years, on both the big and small screen, there was a flourishing of psychological thrillers centered on dead or missing wives told through the eyes of husbands who grieved their absence. Films often with narrative outcomes very similar to those we discover in Silent Hill, which, incidentally, has a wealth of choices regarding the conclusion of James's story, given that the original game featured no less than six unlockable endings.

Gameplay on the Big Screen

The strong point of the video game was that the player himself sought the solution to the mystery, embodying James. In an attempt to replicate that immersion in the story for the viewer, Gans adopts a directorial style that echoes the gameplay of the era and its perspective as much as possible: overhead shots of the streets where James leaves footprints in the accumulated ash, a couple of sequences with a first-person perspective. Unlike other operations of this type, of franchises resurrected a couple of times a decade (see Tron) without a precise direction behind them, Gans, in short, puts a couple of ideas on the table. In the finale, for example, when the true monster of the story has been outlined, there are a couple of nightmarish visions of Mary that, in their allusiveness, are truly unsettling.

However, it is far, far too little for a film with an otherwise inconsistent plot, which cannot compare with the refined intangibility of the original game. Partly because the production means are very poor: certain greenscreens are so economically made that it really feels like being back in 2000. Furthermore, the cast does not feature many well-known faces, also because no one has enough talent to truly stand out or be remembered.

There is, however, a fundamental question, a more interesting failure worth pondering: the “in-gameplay” scenes, besides being ugly to look at, are also ineffective and do not immerse the viewer in the story as a “classic” direction would. Does it make sense to borrow a language that was shaped by the active involvement of the player in a medium that presupposes passivity, especially when in the video game world, those who can, as soon as they have the means, wink precisely at cinematic direction? The impression, watching Return to Silent Hill, is that it's not even a great idea after all.