Pulls you head-first into unfathomable depths of mystery

Rating: 7/10 (2 May 2006)

I knew literally nothing of Silent Hill before I walked into the cinema, as I have never played the game or read anything of it. So I was almost free from bias or prejudice. However, video games have had a terrible history when made into movies (Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon, Tomb Raiders, Doom, Resident Evil), especially in recent years with hacks such Paul Anderson and Doctor Boll laying waste to the genre. So no matter how good I thought Silent Hill was, it still suffers with the stigma of being a video-game movie. I fear a lot of people might unfairly judge film in association with all these terrible movies even though it is millions of miles ahead of them.
Since the plot of the film has been recited a zillion times before I will only give a brief outline. A narcoleptic girl has visions of a ghost town named Silent Hill. Her mother drives to this town to figure out the connection but the girl goes missing. Suddenly three separate timelines begin to exist at once and things become very confusing. But not to the point of incoherence.
Christoph Gans takes the material very seriously and never once sells himself out or disrespects the story by making it simple. The amount of atmosphere he forges is incredible, but I only expected this from the director of Brotherhood of the Wolf. The cinematography is often perfect and world of Silent Hill is so vividly realised that you might get a shock when you walk back out into the sunny real world. It is, at once, both beautiful and horrifying. Gans' original cut is rumored to have been over 200 minutes long. If so, that is one Director's Cut DVD I would love to own.
Mystery and horror go hand-in-hand and in Silent Hill we get ample amounts of both. Most of it is kept in the dark and never fully explained to the audience, which keeps us on our toes and just as perplexed as the characters living in the movie. The complex storytelling is involving but never so sophisticated that it will alienate an unthinking audience. But I didn't like the 'big explanation' at the end. While it certainly doesn't explain everything, I felt that the images used in this brilliantly conceived scene were enough without the narration.
But like all good mystery movies, Silent Hill continues it's fantastical darkness after the credits role by ending on a very curious and intriguing note.
Go see and judge for yourself. You'll be surprised at how much this movie is by far the best mystery AND horror film of 2006 so far.