Silent Hill
I've decided to revisit the Silent Hill series recently and, well, they made a movie loosely based on the first game so I might as well talk about it.
Silent Hill 1 was a groundbreaking late 90s horror game, similar in gameplay, yet very different in style, to the early Resident Evil games. It was a unique pastiche of Stephen Kingian Small Town horror, lovecraftian occultism and disorienting surrealist touches, reminiscent of, say, Jacobs Ladder or Twin Peaks. It followed single father Harry Mason, trying to find his lost daughter Cheryl in the lake side town of Silent Hill and uncovering an occultist conspiracy involving a sinister cult, ritual sacrifice and eldritch gods. It wasn't a super inventive plot, by any means, but presentation and direction still make it stand out as a very well made horror game.
Silent Hill 1 got two notable adaptations, a brilliant reimagining named Shattered Memories, for the Nintendo Wii, and a theatrical movie. They are very different from the source material, in different ways, but where Shattered Memories reinvents the originals pulp horror premise as a deeply touching psychological thriller about loss and grief, the movie... well, it's complicated.
The movie is an awfully schizophrenic affair, torn between adapting the game and heading off in its own direction. Instead of Harry Mason, we have Rose Da Silva , looking somewhat like an older version of Heather from Silent Hill 3, looking for her daughter Sharon and, in what is a comically redundant B-Plot, her husband Chris looking for his wife Rose in Silent Hill. The first half of the movie follows the game it's adapting, more or less. There are some bigger and smaller changes, some of which make sense, some of which don't. The movie uses some monster designs from the later Silent Hill games, most likely because most of the monster designs in Silent Hill 1 were not actually very good, but until the middle it has most of the same plot beats as the game.
Eventually though, it goes of the rails and it goes of the rails hard. The depiction of the cult, of Alessa Gillespie and of the towns backstory are replaced with something very different, and much dumber. There are definitely some valid ideas in there, like actually showing the larger cult, where in the game you only ever interacted with two members thereof, or turning Silent Hill into an abandonded mining town, but that's the best I can say about it. The movie sure doubles down on the campier aspects of Silent Hill's plot, with the cult now being a comically over the top cliché of Salem Witch Trial era Christianity, Alessa's backstory, kept just vague enough in the game, being ruined with exposition that doesn't leave out any tired "cursed child" tropes and a climax that is big and dumb and supremely underwhelming.
There are some neat elements to the movie. It does a decent job adapting some of the games visuals, down to imitating some of its specific fixed camera angles, just as it had the foresight to mainly use Akira Yamaoka's exceptional score for most of the movies soundtrack but in the end, it just doesn't add up to a good movie.
Compared to the game it is based on, the movie is dumb, over the top and not really scary. There are a few individual sequences that turned out pretty well, but whether you're a fan or a newcomer to the series, it simply doesn't offer much. Between the three versions of this story, it's by far the weakest. And, ironically, might even be the least cinematic.
