Striking visuals paired with muddled storytelling

Rating: 3/10 (6 April 2018)

Silent Hill is easily one of the best video game adaptations I've seen, which is to say it's slightly less awful than the usual output. There's obvious passion here to make something worthy of Silent Hill - the disturbing visual design brilliantly captures the eerie atmosphere of the games, with Yamaoka's familiar industrial musical beats conjuring an air of disquieting unease. It's a shame then that the character depth, psychology, symbolism, thematic depth and mature handling of taboo subjects all appear to be absent.
To try and sum up the story of this film would be a hopeless exercise doomed to failure. While many find the original game's story equally convoluted, it's cemented by a strong opening chord - you are lost in an abandoned town; find your missing daughter. The film attempts to expand on the backstory to this opening, but instead just creates nonsensical character actions that muddy our sympathies and generally add nothing meaningful to the plot other than to leave audiences even more baffled (and demonstrate the pointlessness of Sean Bean's character).
Because of this, once the familiar occult elements worm their way into the film, the story goes completely bonkers and off-the-rails with plot holes that yawn wide at the slightest scrutiny. It's less a complex series of puzzle pieces to be connected together than a disorganised mess of cue cards scattered on the floor.
The best example of this is the symbolism - this played a critical role in the psychological aspect in the games, where the monsters were all designed to reflect a particular character's psyche, it's largely what made the games so clever and engrossing. The film, however, seems clueless about this and instead pulls in a variety of monsters from all the early games and mixes them together. This is fatally flawed though: these monsters reflect characters from different stories and therefore have no purpose for being here other than for fan service, essentially reducing them to empty movie monsters with no deeper meaning or purpose other than to menace the main characters.
The loss of meaning in the town's symbolism extends to the other horror elements as well, which throw out disturbing implications (the games never showed a dead person's face, for instance) for cheap jump scares and splatter. The finale in particular is soaked in ludicrous gore which is about as far removed from the psychology of the games as is possible to be.
In short: the characters are thin, the story is a befuddled mess, the horror is schlock-y, the psychology absent and the acting sub-par. On the other hand: the visuals are incredible, the production design stellar and and atmosphere haunting. If you're someone who gets a kick out of gore and horror imagery alone, then it might be worth a look. To all others though, and especially those who think highly of the games, Silent Hill is an aimless amble through murky nonsense.