Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 21, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Saying that Silent Hill is the best movie yet based on a horror video game will no doubt strike many as damning with faint praise. Sure, when the competition is the likes of Doom, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and the, ahem, oeuvre of Uwe Boll, there’s really nowhere to go but up. This time, though, you get more of a sense of a filmmaker committing to making a real movie out of the source material instead of just hitching a who-cares plot onto a marketable title. Not that the storyline of Silent Hill is especially complex, but director Christophe Gans and screenwriter Roger Avary are clearly committed to recreating the game experience in the cinematic medium; having never played it myself, I can’t say how faithful it is, though all early reports are that it maintains a strong fidelity to what is generally regarded as one of the scariest games out there.
The film wastes little time with exposition before plunging its heroine and the audience into the creepy West Virginia town of the title. Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) is terrified by sleepwalking episodes suffered by her adopted daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) in which the little girl keeps repeating the name “Silent Hill.” Desperate for answers, Rose decides to take the girl to what appears to be the source of her trauma, against the wishes of her husband Christopher (Sean Bean). It’s less than 15 minutes into the movie before a mysterious figure in the road causes Rose to crash her car, she wakes up to find Sharon gone and the girl’s trail leads Rose to enter what proves to be a very literal ghost town.
Gans and others have made much of the “immersive” experience the Silent Hill game provides, and which the director and his team have sought to recreate. Yet the way in which Gans and his accomplished cinematographer Dan Laustsen film Rose’s adventures in horrorland make watching them an objective experience, not a subjective one. Rather than shoot the series of bizarre chambers and creatures from Rose’s point of view, they emphasize high angles and overhead views that serve to isolate Rose in the dank, dark environments rather than bring the audience down with her. That works against empathy, and so does the simplicity of Rose’s character and situation—she isn’t given many emotional levels, and spends the film’s first hour simply running from one nightmare scenario to another.
But if it doesn’t engage the emotions as much as it might, Silent Hill sure holds the attention. The movie is dripping with atmosphere, literally—ash drifts down through smoky skies, foul water splashes down onto floors, paint and plaster slough off walls and, just for variety, dead giant beetles decompose and their remains drift up toward the ceiling. The creatures created by Patrick Tatopoulos and his team are many and hideous right from the first major fright setpiece, in which Rose is attacked by a swarm of child-ghouls. It’s such a freaky scene that you wonder what the film can do for an encore, but there are many strange and twisted beings to come, the most impressive of which is game favorite the Red Pyramid.
As Rose and a policewoman named Cybil (Laurie Holden), who has followed her to Silent Hill, run the gauntlet of these fearsome entities, a few clues are uncovered and cryptic hints are dropped by the bedraggled Dahlia (Deborah Kara Unger)—who claims to be Sharon’s real mother—but for quite some time these encounters never seem to bring Rose any closer to finding Sharon. That changes when the movie switches gears in the second half, becoming a less fanciful, somewhat more conventional horror tale—almost like finishing up one video game and starting a second one. The latter part of the film, chock full o’ flashbacks and exposition, deals with good old-fashioned religious puritanism as a source of true evil, and while the specifics don’t have a heck of a lot to do with what Rose has already gone through, they put the story on a more straightforward narrative track that leads to an impressively grisly/apocalpytic conclusion (one that Clive Barker would no doubt appreciate). Sprinkled throughout Rose’s quest are digressions to Christopher attempting to find out what happened to her, which for a while seem superfluous but eventually pay off in the understatedly chill-inducing conclusion.
The movie doesn’t ask much of its lead cast but to maintain the right pitches of determination and hysteria, which they succeed in doing, with good, creepy supporting work by Alice Krige as the key human villain and by young Ferland, who ultimately has three different roles to play in the story and plays them all well. The movie really belongs to Gans and his team of craftspeople, whose rare achievement is to make a movie in which the visuals truly are characters of their own that support and propel the story. Laustsen (encoring from Brotherhood of the Wolf), Tatopoulos, production designer Carol Spier (a longtime David Cronenberg collaborator) and costume designer Wendy Partridge have worked in tandem to create stunning, shocking images, resulting in a viewing experience that, come to think of it, is fairly immersive after all. You may not put yourself in Rose’s shoes, fearing for her, while watching Silent Hill, but spending time in the world they’ve created feels pretty creepy nonetheless.
