SILENT HILL (Christophe Gans, 2006) **

Rating: 5/10 (29 October 2006)

Although the fact that this was inspired by a Japanese video game did not sound promising at first, I was sufficiently impressed by the constantly arresting visuals that, in the end, it is a shame that the storyline is so hopelessly muddled and, consequently, all that care and effort was for naught.
The story of a mother and her precocious adopted child going back to a ghost town to seek out the roots of their nightmares only to be met by a nightmare of far greater proportions had potential but these are only partially realized by the film-makers: following on from the artistic and commercial success of BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (2001), director Christophe Gans is let down by an overly ambitious script by Roger Avary, the co-writer of PULP FICTION (1994) which mixes in childhood fantasies, witch-hunting, nightmarish slithering creatures, the emargination of an individual by a bigoted society, identity doubles, the loss of a child and an examination of the disintegration of the family unit. With all of this going on, it is remarkable that a couple of performances - by Radha Mitchell (as the distraught mother) and Laurie Holden (as a police officer on her tracks who gets more than she bargained for) - shine through; Alice Krige, as the community leader, is quite hammy in comparison and the nominal male lead Sean Bean (as Mitchell's husband) barely registers at all - although this can be explained by the fact that his character was hastily added into the script to appease concerned backers who complained of the lack of men in the story!
As a matter of fact, the original script was around three-and-a-half hours in length and, although this was not filmed in its entirety, some additional material - even as an extra feature on the DVD - might have helped to make this more coherent. As it is, the ending is particularly head-scratching...