Beautiful

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2007)

First off, this is not a game clone. If you have played the original Silent Hill video game, you'll have a fresh outlook on the story to look forward to. While the changes disturbed me a bit at first, I feel they were necessary to the overall success of Silent Hill the movie. Alice Krige does a beautiful job of making sure her character, the religious zealot, Christabella, does not sound contrived in her dialog, which would have been an easy mistake. The game version of the character Dahlia Gillespie is shallow and unchallenging, but Gans has reworked her into a believable person with real emotions, and Deborah Kara Unger really brings her to life for the first time! The visuals are grotesquely beautiful. Each creature has it's own feel, it's own texture, and it's own personality. They are ripped straight from the tortured mind of an emotionally and physically abused little girl, and they have a way of reminding you what it was like to be so young; everything distorted and frightening in your nightmares. They look as though made of plastic, yet they have flesh and bone and blood...symbolic of the toys of a small child, yet they are tainted with the horrible reality of the frailty of living things.
The music is taken straight from the games, with minor 'facelifts' so to speak. Added instruments only make Akira Yamaoka's haunting melodies all the more addictive and frightening. This movie is a video game adaptation, yet has few of the pitfalls typical of the game movies before it. Do not be mistaken; Silent Hill is not a horror movie. It is at it's roots a drama...the story of a child forced down the path of evil to take revenge upon those who caused her such agony.