Silent Hill

Synopsis:Rose and Christopher de Silva’s daughter, Sharon, has been having nightmares. And sleepwalking. She’s going mad they fear, as her sleepwalking leads her to attempting to jump off cliffs. She always screams about a place, Silent Hill. Rose takes Sharon there against Christopher’s wishes in the hopes of curing her nightmares. Instead, she walks right into one…

Plenty of games lie unfinished on my shelves because they were boring but Silent Hill 2 was the only game I stopped playing because it scared the living hell out of me. In a movie you can laugh and know that the hero shouldn’t go down that corridor, or open that door. It’s different when you’re playing a game that forces you to do it, repeatedly, and has the most enveloping atmosphere of terror you can experience in a game. So naturally, I was curious to see how that kind of experience would translate itself to the big screen.

The answer is much as you’d expect, given that it’s a game-to-movie adaptation. The atmosphere is preserved intact, but the plot isn’t much to speak of. Beyond the creepy camerawork and peerless set design (courtesy of Cronenberg regular, Carol Spier), it’s pretty much an empty film. But the absence of a decent plot shouldn’t put off anyone looking for a good horror experience. You’d be hard-pressed to imagine a more terrifying and compelling vision of Hell, and the gore-hounds will be more than satisfied by the end, which is truly nasty.

The plot is basically that Rose takes Sharon to Silent Hill, loses her after a car accident and then races around town trying to find her. Periodically, a darkness descends on the town that transforms it into Hell on Earth, complete with monsters that are genuinely freaky. The best of these is Pyramid Head, my favourite scary guy from the computer game. A dark and menacing creature who tears the living apart with his bare hands. His scenes alone make the film worth watching. And meanwhile, Chris is trying to find Rose, but due to some mystical mechanism, he is searching for her in the present while Rose and Sharon are trapped in the past. The scenes where Chris and Rose occupy the same space, but in different times, had the potential to be truly tragic, to emphasise the disconnection that has come from their different approaches to dealing with Sharon’s problems. But sadly, they don’t quite work. Which is a summation of the entire story. It doesn’t quite work.

The film looks and sounds great, but the actors are unimportant, the story isn’t anything to get excited about, and everyone seems to know it. It’s probably one of the best computer game to movie translations yet, and by far the most faithful to the look and feel of the game, but it’s not really enough. There aren’t enough “Darkness” sequences, which are the only real strong point, and the extended expository explanation at the end saps all energy from the film. And energy is what this film has going for it, for the most part the characters are on the run - running from freaky-arse creatures bent on skinning you alive, or running to the next place Sharon might be hiding. The writers obviously had ambition, with a story criss-crossing thirty years and some ham-fisted scenes that could easily be taken as a critique of current Western politics. But the film never goes anywhere with its ideas. All up, Silent Hill is a fun time if you like the idea of your eyes being subjected to horrors that beggar belief and even if they’re only punctuation marks in a very long sentence

 

 

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