The game was a puzzle and so is the film - Deliberately.

Rating: 10/10 (23 April 2006)

It's rare to see a film so equally loved and misunderstood by so many people and it reminds me of a few other great puzzle movies that take time to decipher and accept. Two big similar puzzle movies are 2001 A Space Odyssey and Mullholland Drive - both completely indecipherable at first, then slowly (often with help or by reading the book) it all begins to make sense until they begin to feel like masterpieces.
Silent Hill is one of these movies but its the first to be a Saturday-night pop-culture crowd pleaser and this is what makes it unique.
The video-game original was essentially a big puzzle made up of smaller puzzles; you wander around a town collecting clues and solving riddles to be rewarded with a fragment of story. Clearly and very cleverly, the film does the same thing and has skillfully managed to involve the viewer in a puzzle solving mystery. The plot is all there, it's logical and it makes sense, but the exposition is totally illogical and scatter-shot.
This story would have been so easy to tell with a normal five act narrative, with answers to all of its questions and coming from Gans (who's previous films have been solidly executed) it seems strange he would lose plot-logic on a story so mundane.... The truth is, he didn't lose the plot... he's warped it. The story exposition is deliberately given out like random jigsaw pieces with just enough thread of narrative to keep a basic idea of what's happening. Clues are hidden in the background, in the sets (take a close look at the paintings) and in the dialogue. Everything you need to know to understand this movie is right there... but it doesn't make sense because you've been presented with a twisted enigma, a nightmarish puzzler that keeps you awake long after the vicious visuals have lost their impact.
This puzzle wasn't the random aberration of a lunatic scriptwriter and a backwards film editor. At some point the creative team sat down and asked the question "how can we bring the game experience into a movie?" They made a conscious decision to trick our minds by messing with the standard film narrative and challenge us to something more interesting; they've forced us to think about it and work-out the story from the clues. This is a video-game conversion unlike any other in that they've captured the very core and essence of the game playing experience.
To judge this film as a movie, and to give it a 'movie review' based on 'what we expect from a film' then the score would be pretty low. Silent Hill does not follow convention or help us by making a pleasant story to sit back and enjoy. It hurls us into a twisted nightmare world of shifting environments and parallel dimensions without explaining why. It does away with exposition and character development in any ordinary sense. If you are the kind of person who needs the answers given to them then Silent Hill may not be for you. But if you're a thinker, a solver, a gamer or someone with a curiosity of intellect then Silent Hill is the movie you've waited for.
This film isn't about running down corridors and shooting monsters. It's about you, being smart enough, to break its code.
The film makers have thrown down the challenge.
Dare you. Dare you. Double dare you.