Poorly translated from the game, good as a standalone movie

Rating: 7/10 (4 February 2010)

Someone said in a review I read a second ago that "Silent Hill" is something that he called a "nightmare drama." To clarify, there is no such genre as "nightmare drama." That doesn't exist. What he clearly meant to say is that Silent Hill is "a drama with horrific elements that follows the journey of a central protagonist through a Lovecraftian nightmare world that ultimately leads her to confront deeper aspects of herself and humanity in general."
That, children, is what "horror" is.
"Silent Hill" isn't what has become accepted as "horror." Horror can be all blood, guts and cheap scares, but that's shallow horror. True horror uses subtlety, slow-burn, suspense, and its horrific elements are made up of things that, given another context, would be normal, or almost normal. Horror is, essentially, when everything in the room is horribly, disturbingly WRONG, but the room doesn't seem to agree. The tone (the feeling of the author or scene) is normal, smooth, almost blasé, while the mood (the reactionary feeling of the audience to the things on screen) is utterly disturbed.
Good horror = a man wakes up in his bed, sees his young daughter, who has been dead for years, walking across the ceiling.
Bad horror = A masked grotesquery wielding a chainsaw, in full, plain view, cuts a young woman's head off. The camera focuses on what was once her neck, spraying blood all over the room.
You're probably asking by this point, "which is the Silent Hill movie, good or bad horror?" To tell you the truth, a bit of both.
I saw this movie before I played any of the games. That way, I didn't find myself comparing it to every aspect of the games that it got wrong, and I was able to enjoy it to a far greater degree than I would have otherwise. The monsters (especially the Grey Children) were superbly recreated. They were extremely disturbing and the fact that why they look the way they are is never explained makes it even more unsettling; it helps you feel that the protagonist has stumbled into a world that really is completely different from what we have come to know as "ordinary." The creepy little girl is the best part, I think. Although creepy little girls with long, black hair are always scary, this movie uses the element cleverly, in a way that doesn't feel as though she's scaring us for the sake of scaring us- there's a reason for everything she does, however unsettling or seemingly random it may appear. This, in turn, adds to the creepiness.
That's all the good I have to say about this movie. It was scary at times, but the interjections with Chris Da Silva were pointless and broke the flow of the movie. The climax of the movie on is the best part by far. I'm not gonna spoil anything, but trust me, one of the final scenes in the movie almost makes the whole damn thing on its own. Pyramid Head is pretty cool, but he's just another monster here. He's not playing the role he played in SH2, he's just some guy with a giant, pointy hat and a sword that he probably should have considered scaling down a bit for the sake of practical use (there's a reason it's so huge in the game, but in this movie it's just a part of his costume). The acting is sub-B grade, the story is hammy, Sean Bean's character is more or less pointless, the subtlety was sliced in half by Pyramid Head's great knife, and many of the scarier monsters are put in simply because of their iconic status within the games. The result is that all of them are taken out of context seemingly without the writer of the movie having understood what they were meant to represent in the games. Pyramid Head's role is definitely the most painful case of a beloved Silent Hill ghoul's significance being nullified by his out of context placement in this movie, but the most pointless appearance came from the nurses. Really, why did they have to be in this movie? Was Rose battling with her own sexuality underneath everything else that was going on, trying in vain to repress a furious lust for women? If that's the case, it was never mentioned in the movie, and if it isn't, then the nurses are completely present as a fan service.
It's not a bad movie if you judge it by its own merits. I still think someone more capable, that is, someone who actually understood the game, should have another go at the series some ways down the road. As a game to movie translation, this film is a swing and a miss. As a HORROR movie, though, it's well worth at the very least renting for a weekend.