Return to Silent Hill (2026)
Back when I wrote a review for Silent Hill Revelations I, rhetorically, asked why the Silent Hill movies went directly from an adaptation of the first game to an adaptation of the third game while skipping the second one. Back then I suggested that was because sometimes god has mercy on us. Return to Silent Hill is one of many pieces of evidence to suggest that by now, he might have abandoned us for good.
All polemics aside, though, Return to Silent Hill is, indeed, a loose adaptation of Silent Hill 2, originally released in 2002 and remade, very competently, in 2024. Silent Hill 2 is widely held to have one of the best stories in any video game, period. A gothic tale of young widower James Sunderland taking on an orphic journey to the titular lakeside town where he and his wife had spent their honeymoon, finding it haunted by monsters and demons representing his own repressed guilt. I don't necessarily think of it as having the best story in the medium, or even really in its own series, but I will definitely say it's probably pretty high up there. Adapting it to film is french director Christophe Gans who had previously adapted Silent Hill 1 in 2006, a movie that is widely considered to be one of the better video game adaptations for reasons mostly incomprehensible to me.
About two years ago, when I played Bloober Teams remake of Silent Hill 2 I was, sometimes, wondering how a version less slavishly devoted to the original, a version more eager to get weird with it might have looked. Of course I did that with the knowledge that when, say, the remakes of Final Fantasy 7 "get weird with it", they get to do that because they're made by most of the creative team behind the original game applying decades worth of hindsight to the original text and reflecting on their own work and its cultural impact. It's not that nothing good can't possibly come out of a creator making someone elses work his own, I'd never say that, but I will say that Return to Silent Hill certainly doesn't make an argument for it.
RTSH takes the broad strokes of Silent Hill 2. There is a guy named James, played by Jeremy Irvine. He meets a girl named Mary, played by Hannah Emilie Anderson. They start a relationship. They're not together anymore. He receives a letter from her and goes to the town of Silent Hill, where, in this version, they lived together. He finds it turned into a sort of foggy purgatory overrun by demonic creatures. He goes on a journey through it to learn the truth about Mary and himself. An attempt is made to remix and reframe the story beats of the source material. The movie turns James into a tortured artist. The movie adds an evil, demon worshipping cult again, which is an angle the Silent Hill movies just can't let go off and which factors heavily into Mary's new backstory. Supporting characters like Angela and Laura now explicitly represent aspects of Mary. And the reveals are handled very differently, none for the better.
It tells a story of 8 hours in a time frame of under 2 hours and somehow felt it wise to still overcomplicate it, to a point where the attempts at increased complexity combined with the movies breathless pacing add up to something that won't make sense to people familiar with the game and will be impossible to follow for those who aren't. All of which makes RTSH feel less like a properly developed narrative and more like a highlight reel of surrealist setpieces that, I imagine, are about what someone who's never seen a David Lynch movie thinks David Lynch movies are like. It's just the fact that the movies plot is the "And then..." method of writing, taking to its absolute extreme, where James gets pushed from location to location and from setpiece to setpiece, being given barely more time to do anything other than run and grunt, any sort of arc being practically imperceptible. Well meaning but sparse and underwritten flashback sequences elaborating on his and Mary's relationship doing little to alleviate that problem, although the fact that neither of the actors playing them seem to be working very hard doesn't help. Matter of fact, the best performance in this might be the kid that plays Laura who, hey, also voiced her in the games remake. Also, this might be petty, but indulge me for a moment: Is it just me or do more and more productions these days just feature a psychotherapist among their cast, just so they can have an excuse to bluntly exposit on a characters mental state? I feel like I've been seeing that more and more often, recently.
Writing aside, the movie's also just not well produced. I'm cutting them some slack for obviously working on a low budget but it has that characteristic smeary, fuzzy low budget CGI look that so many European fantasy productions are settled with and it's just not good enough at stylization to make it work. It's not that the monster and environmental designs are necessarily bad, although they mostly miss the mark of the games art direction, but it's that the visual style makes all of it look like a 00's music video. I would have liked to be able to say that I could appreciate the movie at least as an artistic parade of surreal sequences but frankly, the movies direction is just way too loud and obnoxious for that. So despite its best efforts it certainly can't pass as an arthouse production. RTSH goes out of its way to pay visual homage to films like Rosemary's Baby, The Shining and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but it's never more than this cheap, trashy fastfood simulacrum of an arthouse horror movie. Limp Bizkit sampling the Suspiria soundtrack.
Let me be honest here, I really, really didn't enjoy this. It's not a good adaptation of Silent Hill 2. It's not a good original movie inspired by Silent Hill 2. It doesn't look good. It doesn't sound good. It's not written well or even comprehensibly. I don't think Christophe Gans was a good pick to direct the first Silent Hill movie nor was it a good idea to let him direct another one. Silent Hill is a setting with almost unlimited potential and yet all either of its adaptations ever managed to produce are worse versions of the games. Just fucking let a good director tell their own story in the Silent Hill universe. There's no reason to continuously try, and fail, to adapt the games. There is a reason people say that sort of behavior is the definition of insanity. This is probably the worst out of the three Silent Hill movies, simply on the virtue that at least Revelations occasionally managed to be unintentionally funny. If they ever make another one, I hope they rethink their approach. Or maybe they'll just drag Christophe Gans back in five years to adapt fucking Silent Hill 4: The Room, what do I know.
