Accurate to the first Silent Hill game, but shares its flaws

Rating: 5/10 (10 November 2018)

Everyone knows Silent Hill 2 (the game) is the best one. It's a timeless classic, about a man's search for his dead wife in the mysterious, fog shrouded and monster filled town. It has a more psychological, mature and subdued tone than the other games, often almost dreamlike. It would have been a great starting point for a far better movie, but the actual Silent Hill movie, taking its inspiration mainly from the first game, is just okay.
A woman called Rose goes with her daughter to the town, after her daughter begins to mutter its name as she sleepwalks. But when they get to the town, Rose's daughter goes missing, and she encounters a cop called Cybil who has chased her into the town. Eventually they team up to figure out what's going on, and save the missing girl. They encounter a cult, and there's a pointless subplot about Rose's husband, played by Sean Bean, tracking Rose and his daughter down.
The movie more or less captures the surface-level spirit of the games, with great fog and beautifully dressed abandoned buildings. Its handling of monsters is also a cut above what it could have been. Though the CGI is often obvious, given that the monsters are so otherworldly, it doesn't matter as much as it would in a more realistic movie. And unlike the games, monsters aren't really re-used between scenes, and their intent is sometimes more ambiguous than the always-hostile creatures in the games. The acting is also quite good, especially from the young girl who plays Rose's daughter.
However, the movie falls down in a lot of ways. Pyramid Head is underused and lacks the ambiguity of the other monsters (he's clearly malevolent). I wish the movie subscribed to the fan theory from SH2 that Pyramid Head is a kind of helper to the main character disguised as a Big Bad (he helps James in the hospital by knocking him down, drains the water in the staircase of one of the buildings etc.) The cult is also poorly handled, with a lot of generic dialogue about "burning the impure" and so on. This is accurate to the first game (though the cult was much lower key than in the movie) but I wish they'd made it more subtle. It forces the entire film into a B-movie mould. The characters, though well acted, are pretty poorly drawn, and again I wished they'd ripped off SH2 more, and made the monsters/events of the town more about the main character rather than who it turns out to be about. Also, the violence is OTT and silly, another element that lowers the tone of the movie.
As for what the movie offers to someone who hasn't played the games: very little. Jacob's Ladder, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and all the other things that inspired the games, are far better than this movie, so just watch (or re-watch) them instead.
And not to sound like a broken record, but a movie inspired by SH2 would also offer much more to the casual movie fan than this movie. Who wouldn't be intrigued by the simple premise: "A man receives a letter from his dead wife, asking him to meet her in Silent Hill." But a movie like what would require a maturity lacking from his one. A movie like that exists only in my restless dreams...