Silent Hill (2006)

 

Videogame adaptations are usually a lost cause. For some strange reason, a great many filmmakers never quite seem to grasp what it is about the game that made people love it and then proceed to royally piss off most fans. Some games have little mythos and then you get absurdly mesmerising yet incomprehensible stuff like 'The Super Mario Bros Movie', and when there is too much mythos the film falls short as 'Assassin's Creed'. Yet sometimes, the makers hit the mark. Heck, the first 'Mortal Kombat' film got it, even if it was hampered by a PG-13 rating, but one that pretty much nailed it, is this 'Silent Hill'. 

If you don't know the game: 'Silent Hill' is a horrorgame set in a town called Silent Hill where things have gone awry in spectacular fashion. No one really knows what happened, but you are stuck in a town that is constantly enveloped in a sort of mist and malformed beings are trying to kill you. There's more to it than this, but you get the basics. 

In this film, Rose and Chris Silva have adopted a little girl called Sharon, who sleepwalks and often cries out "Silent Hill!". This of course baffles the parents, and Rose is determined to figure out what happened in Sharon's past. She sets out to the town of Silent Hill, without the husband knowing or liking it. Silent Hill turns out to be a ghost town, abandoned because of the coal mine underneath catching fire some years ago and still burning to this day, making the air nigh unbreathable. 

Rose gets into an accident after speeding away from a police officer (great idea) and when she wakes, Sharon is gone. Rose heads into the town, that is misty and grey because of a perpetual ash downfall and everything feels suitably dilapidated. But every time an alarm sounds throughout the town, it metamorphoses into a hellish landscape filled with horrifying visions and beings. As Rose delves deeper into the history of the town (a little girl seems to be directing her towards certain locations), it turns out that the horrors she has witnessed so far are nothing compared to the horror that people can do to one another... 

At times, this film does feel a bit like a videogame, as our lead characters are going from one location to the next: first the streets, then a school, a hotel and finally a church and hospital, but that is the only videogame-like trick the makers pull. For the most part, this is a story of a mother searching desperately for her daughter and discovering more than she bargained for. The film starts off as an ominous supernatural thriller, goes full on Dante hellscape somewhere in the middle (with the appearance of the game's classic monster Pyramid Head - who looks and feels more threatening than the name suggests) and it ends with the horror of humanity and zealots doing what they do best: fuck things up for others. 

I'm serious: once you learn what has transpired in this town, the supernatural stuff is nothing compared to the actions of certain people. It's a bit like a Stephen King trope, but it works. 

The actors are good to really good. Radha Mitchell is convincing as the desperate mom and Laurie Holden is great as the police officer who also gets dragged into Silent Hill and eventually wants to help, even if she starts out as the sceptical one. And then we get a heavy hitter like Alice Krige as the head of the community still present in Silent Hill. She can play a religious nutcase with such conviction, it's actually quite terrifying. Especially her calm demeanour and the clear idea that she believes that what she does is righteous. 

You'll love to hate her, trust me. 

The scenery is wonderful in a disturbing way and it genuinely looks and feels like settings from the game. The hellscape surroundings are actually less disturbing than the perpetual fog and ash during the 'day time'. The finale in the church might be a bit over the top, but it all has this poignancy to it, and the ending is surprisingly emotional and heartbreaking when you realise all that has happened. 

'Silent Hill' works, not just as a videogame adaptation that clearly knows its source material, but also as a supernatural horrorfilm. It has suspense, gore, a decent story and a surprising amount of heart. So give it a try. Even if you don't know the game, you might appreciate this one.