SILENT HILL (2006)

Studio:       TriStar Pictures
Director:    Christophe Gans
Writer:       Roger Avary
Producer:  Samuel Hadida
Stars:     Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates, Alice Krige, Jodelle Ferland

Review Score:

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Summary:

A mother is trapped between two nightmarish dimensions as she searches for her daughter in the otherworldly town of Silent Hill.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Rose chases her sleepwalking daughter Sharon to a nearby waterfall at night, where the young girl mutters ‘Silent Hill’ before collapsing. Against her husband Christopher’s wishes, Rose decides to take Sharon to Silent Hill and find out what is wrong with her. At a gas station, Rose notices that her adopted daughter’s drawings are covered in black marks and strange pictures, which Sharon claims she did not do. Rose’s credit card is declined as Christopher has cancelled it in an effort to stop her from going to Silent Hill.

Police officer Cybil Bennett follows them from the gas station and tries to pull their car over, but Rose speeds away. Intense static comes over the radio and when Rose takes her eyes off the road to turn it off, a dark-haired girl appears in front of the car. The car swerves and Rose is knocked unconscious. She awakens in fog-shrouded Silent Hill to find Sharon missing.

Rose searches the ash-covered town, long abandoned due to the coal fire still burning underground. Rose descends a staircase as an air raid siren starts blaring. She lights a flame and finds herself underground in a rusty metal works. A bloody figure wearing a gas mask hangs from a fence. After it startles her, she is surrounded by children that seem to be made out of molten rock. She runs until she trips. The creatures claw at her. She screams and they dissipate as Rose collapses.

Rose awakens back in foggy Silent Hill. She searches the town and finds major sinkholes and collapsed roads that have the town cut off. Witch-like Dahlia Gillespie comes upon Rose and speaks of terrible things done to her own daughter, Alessa. Rose shows her a locket of Sharon and Dahlia grabs at it. Dahlia claims, “she is mine.” Rose knocks her down and runs away.

Christopher shows up at a gas station in Brahams looking for his wife. Rose continues searching Silent Hill but is cuffed and arrested by Officer Bennett. Cybil indicates that her motorcycle spun out and she was also unconscious. Rose’s car will not start, so the two women begin walking out of town. Officer Thomas Gucci meets Christopher at the barricaded road entrance to Silent Hill. Cybil finds that the road out of town is now missing, having fallen into depthless fog. She decides to escort Rose to a fire lookout tower instead. Static comes over Cybil’s radio and an armless creature shambles towards them. Cybil shoots it, but has to remove her helmet and jacket when it spits a black fog on her. Rose runs away in the confusion to search the school. Thomas and Christopher search Silent Hill, but their world does not appear unusual or covered in fog like the one that Rose is in.

While searching the school, mask-wearing figures chase after Rose. She hides in a classroom where she finds the desk of Alessa Gillespie and has a vision of the girl being tormented by classmates. The word “witch” is scrawled into the desk. Rose chases a little girl to the bathroom. In one of the stalls she finds a corpse with the nametag “Colin” strung up in barbwire. She pulls something from its mouth.

Rose evades the strange people pursuing her when the siren sounds again and the world transforms back to red rust before her eyes. She flees from a crawling man who is bent over backwards and witnesses three people being consumed by large crawling insects. A girl who looks like Sharon is seen drawing at a desk in one room before Rose falls through a broken grate. On the floor below, Pyramid Head appears and Rose runs away. Christopher feels his wife’s presence, but he and Thomas are shown to be in a different reality.

Cybil pulls Rose into a room and they bar the door shut. Pyramid Head is stabbing through the door as insect creatures pour in when the world changes back to foggy Silent Hill. Safe for the moment, Rose shows Cybil the debris pulled from the corpse in the bathroom, which comes from the Grand Hotel. Their own search unsuccessful, Thomas takes Christopher back to the road entrance, but Christopher believes he is hiding something.

At the Grand Hotel, the two women find a woman named Anna throwing rocks at Dahlia. Anna appears mentally disturbed. She mumbles about a woman named Christabella who keeps them safe and about taking refuge in a church. She also says that the cross image on the floor is a symbol of their faith. Rose takes a knife. Cybil finds a child’s drawing in the mailbox for room 111. Christopher sneaks into the Brahams archives and discovers through pictures that Alessa and Sharon look alike.

With Anna in tow, Cybil and Rose explore the hotel and find a painting of a witch burning. Rose uses her knife to cut through the painting and finds the door to room 111. In the room, they jump through the window to an adjacent factory. Rose runs ahead and finds Alessa, who immolates herself and then disappears. Rejoining the other women, Rose tells them about her Alessa sighting. They see the cross symbol in the architecture. Anna warns that the darkness is coming after crows begin scattering. They run for the church as the siren blares again. A stream of cult members runs out of the fog and into the church. Dahlia is on the steps outside and warns Cybil not to enter the church, but Anna hits Dahlia with another rock. Rose tries to ask about her daughter as the world begins changing to rust. Anna fails to make it inside and has her skin torn off by Pyramid Head.

At the orphanage, a nun discourages Christopher’s investigation into Alessa. Thomas arrives and cuffs Christopher. He then recounts the story of a group in Silent Hill that burned the child 30 years ago before he tells Christopher to go home. After a group prayer inside the church with the strange cross, Rose asks cult leader Christabella for help finding Sharon. Christabella says that only a demon knows where her daughter is. She accompanies Rose and Cybil to Brookhaven Hospital where Rose is to find the demon. Rose memorizes a map and a few cult members open the elevator for her. Christabella gives Rose back her locket but sees the picture of the girl inside. She screams that Rose is a witch, but Cybil holds off the group while Rose descends in the elevator. The cult captures Cybil.

Rose explores the red rust basement and makes her way past a group of creatures dressed as nurses. She enters a room of blinding white light where Alessa explains everything to her though narration. Alessa was born without a father, which ostracized her from the community. She was abused by many, including a janitor named Colin. Christabella asks Dahlia to bring Alessa to the Grand Hotel, where the church congregation tries to burn Alessa for her impurity. A chain holding Alessa’s pyre breaks and starts a fire. Thomas rescues the badly burned Alessa and takes her to the hospital. While bedridden, her hate grew strong and she somehow hurt a nurse in a red sweater. A dark force took over Alessa with the promise of vengeance.

Rose opens her eyes and finds herself in Alessa’s rusted hospital room with the deformed nurse in the red sweater. The little girl she sees there claims to be the dark part of Alessa. Sharon is what is left of her goodness. The girl tells Rose that Christabella will also try to purify Sharon and it is up to Rose to stop it. The girl then enters Rose’s body.

Christabella’s mask-wearing minions find Sharon hiding in a room above Nathan’s drugstore. Dahlia is captured at the same time. Meanwhile, Thomas drops Christopher outside of city limits and sends him home.

At the church, Christabella tells her congregation that the Demon fathered Sharon and they must burn the child. Strapped to a ladder, Cybil is lowered into the fire first and burns to death slowly. Sharon is strapped to the ladder next. While Christabella preaches, Rose enters and confronts her. She tells the assembly that she came from the outside world and Christabella lied to them about the apocalypse. She adds that Alessa was an innocent child and they are all damned. Christabella stabs her. A blood droplet from Rose transforms the circular altar into a vertical shaft down to the red rust world. Her wound then heals as numerous barbwire ropes climb out of the pit with a burned adult Alessa in the center. Christabella is strung up by the barbwire and the dark little girl ascends from the pit. Christabella is torn in half by the barbwire and other congregation members are attacked. Dahlia turns away from Alessa and Rose frees Sharon from her ropes. Rose tells her daughter to shut her eyes.

When her eyes open, they are back in the foggy version of Silent Hill. Dahlia, the only other person there, asks why Alessa did not take her with the others. Rose explains it is because Dahlia is her mother. Rose and Sharon leave Silent Hill and return home, but they are shown to still be in a different reality from Christopher.

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Review:

Movies based on video games are routinely as underwhelming as video games based on movies.  “Silent Hill” steps in the right direction until it is finally done in by a muddled climax and the plodding pace it takes to get there.  Unlike many video game films, however, director Christophe Gans displays a genuine affection for the source material.  It is clear that he understands the psychological level on which Silent Hill has always affected its players.  He makes sincere efforts to recreate that mood in the movie while retaining many of the key set pieces from the first game.  Yet even with an evident appreciation for the brand, what makes it onto the screen does not translate into something completely functional.

Unsurprisingly, the best aspects of the film are the elements borrowed straight from the game.  Gans wisely chose to reuse Akira Yamaoka’s unique orchestrations as the main soundtrack for the movie.  Yamaoka’s music is among the most haunting complete scores ever heard in a video game.  Those familiar mandolin strains echoed in the opening could play over a montage of children eating ice cream beneath a rainbow and make it the most unsettling image ever seen.

The recreation of Silent Hill as a fog-dense ghost town blanketed with falling ash fills out the tone admirably.  It looks like the town from the game.  More importantly, it feels like there is something more to be frightened of in that choking haze than just what it will do to your lungs.

It is the changes made to the game world that detract from the overall atmosphere in the film.  And this is not because they violate any respect for the original material.  Rather, they fail to expound upon it in a meaningful way.

Pyramid Head is likely the most recognizable enemy in the Silent Hill games, acting as a mascot of sorts for the series.  And for good reason.  Few things are more menacing in the Silent Hill universe than this seven-foot tall beast of a man carrying an impossibly sized bloody sword and wearing an enormous metal pyramid for a mask.  It is curious that his filmic counterpart needed to be introduced with a pointless accompaniment of several thousand CGI insect creatures.  Pyramid Head is imposing enough on his own that animated insects only distract from the creature’s physical imposition.  Silent Hill has a visceral quality that accents its vaguely human-like shapes.  Its world resembles a twisted mirrored vision of our own with grime that seeps below its surface.  Post-production digital effects do a disservice by adding a layer of smooth fluidity that does not mesh well with the raw appearance of what lies beneath.

When it comes to the characters, there is nothing inherently wrong with changing Silent Hill’s protagonist from the game’s devoted father to the film’s determined and resourceful blonde mother, Rose.  Except when pairing her with an equally determined and resourceful blonde woman.  The initial conflict between Rose and Cybil, the police officer searching for Rose and missing girl Sharon in Silent Hill, evaporates quickly.  From there until the climax, their individual action threads could be swapped without affecting the story.

Rose naturally panics and enters a hysteric state when facing Pyramid Head, until Cybil pulls her to safety while screaming at Rose to help bar the door.  After they escape and reality shifts on them, Cybil belts out her frustration with screaming dialogue while Rose is the one now asking her to calm down.  Their behavior is mirroring when it should be complementary.  Cybil could be lifted out of the story entirely or combined with Rose and little, if anything, would change.

The character of Christopher, the husband and father, has a subplot that plays like a completely separate and unnecessary story since it goes nowhere and has zero bearing on the plot.  When his arc is complete, Christopher is in the exact same place he started, with every other character and the town of Silent Hill unaffected by anything he did.  It came as no surprise upon discovering afterward that Christopher was reportedly added at the studio’s insistence.  It comes across for what it is: a tacked-on afterthought.  Fearful that there were too many female leads and no men, that is minus one point for useless studio memos.  Cutting these intrusive scenes would have been an enormous boon to the film’s overlong runtime.

At 125 minutes, “Silent Hill” is much longer than it needs to be.  Rose spends so much time trudging slowly through the bizarre town that she makes it to the last act without being any closer to finding her daughter or understanding the girl’s connection to Silent Hill.  The film then seems to grasp an awareness of the amount of attention paid to mood at the expense of story.  Realizing how much catching up there is to do during the home stretch, “Silent Hill” suddenly spits out a heap of expository information.  Information that adds up to a partially confusing backstory, and leaves new questions in the wake of those it tries answering.

Around the 90-minute mark, a nearly 10-minute sequence begins that consists mainly of narration, flashbacks, and explanation.  Having to devote that much time to exposition, particularly at a point when the film is 75% over, is a failure in visual storytelling.  Once the movie starts trying to explain itself, it becomes clear that the motivations behind the grotesqueries and fever dreams is not really standing on solid ground.  Almost fitting, in a way, for a town whose unstable roads reside over a still-burning coal fire.

In the battle of style versus substance, “Silent Hill” declares one of them to be the clear victor.  The crumbling world delivers a powerful first impression, just not a lasting one.  It is an impressive town to travel through for nightmarish imagery and shiver-inducing mood.  It is just a shame that the stay lasts longer than it should and the reason for visiting never makes itself clear.

Click here for Culture Crypt’s review of the sequel, "Silent Hill: Revelation."

Review Score:  60

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