A great looking film...

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2006)

As the film opens, young Sharon Da Silva (Jodelle Ferland) is in the grip of a bad dream that has taken her out of her house and to the edge of a cliff. Nightmares and sleepwalking have become a regular part of her nightly regimen, and her parents differ about what should be done. Christopher (Sean Bean), the practical one, believes that medicine and time in a hospital will cure Sharon. His wife, Rose (Radha Mitchell), disagrees. She decides to take Sharon to visit the mysterious locale in which her nightmares take place - the abandoned town of Silent Hill, which sits atop a mine that has been on fire for three decades.
Rose and Sharon's arrival in Silent Hill is brutal. They are involved in an automobile accident when Rose swerves to avoid a girl who dashes into the road. When Rose recovers consciousness, her daughter is gone. Rose tries to phone Christopher, but her cell phone won't function properly. Accompanied by Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden), a police officer who pursued her into Silent Hill, Rose sets off in search of Sharon. At its best, the town is an eerie place - a crumbling relic with the sun hidden by a fog created by falling ash. At its worst, during periods of inexplicable blackness, it becomes hell on earth, with demonic beings and zombies rising up from the ground.
I have never played the game Silent Hill, but that didn't stop me from appreciating some of what director Christophe Gans (who displayed a similar visual flair in Brotherhood of the Wolf) puts on the screen - although I suspect aficionados will have a better grasp of what is transpiring. Silent Hill looks great. The town is suitably eerie and the periods of darkness are ominous. The movie is all about visual appeal, feel, and tone, because the story underwhelms. The plot concerns Rose tracking down Sharon, going from place to place and following clues until she discovers the truth about her daughter and Silent Hill's dark past. Meanwhile, Sean Bean is wasted as Christopher. His subplot could have been excised. All he does is wander around, mostly in the rain, learning the town's history and trying to find out the fate of his wife and daughter. One expects a payoff from his activities, but there isn't one.