Surprisingly good ghost story - who cares about the game?

Rating: 8/10 (13 September 2006)

Yes, I know this is based on a popular series of video games. Who cares? I haven't played 'em, neither have most people. That's the end of that topic.
Silent Hill is a story of twin tragedies, one the public ruin of a West Virginia mining town which has collapsed into the (real and metaphoric) underground fires of its own coal mines, the other the brutal history of a young girl with a mysterious past tied to the town. The story unfolds as a series of clues are pieced together by the girl's adoptive mother, searching for her in the ruins, while in a parallel plot line, the semi-estranged father sifts through records of the town. The movie is a bit slow to get to the reasons behind all this, and relies too heavily on a single long expository scene (complete with flashbacks) to finally piece it all together, but the revelations, when they come, are satisfying (that seems to be a word I keep returning to in my consideration of the movie: it satisfies).
This movie stands on its own merits as a much better ghost story than we've seen on film for a while now. While most of the horror genre seems itching to see how many psychopaths it can cram onto screen at one time (Saw, House of Wax) or splatter-driven monsters (Descent, Hills Have Eyes), lost in the background is the self-contained ghost story. The key difference here is that unlike a horror flick in which the villain is a psycho (Hostel), or a monster (Dawn of the Dead), or a disease (Cabin Fever, 28 Days), the ghost story demands a *STORY*. It has to have an internal rationale, a reason for the ghost to be haunting folks.
Short of some of the Dark Castle productions, that attention to background rationale has been missing from many recent horror flicks. Enter Silent Hill, which takes a longish while to get to the reason for all the horrific ghoulies, but which satisfyingly delivers once it does. The story, when it comes, satisfies in a way I haven't seen since The Ring, though it also reminded me of the excellent Poltergeist.
Similar to The Ring, there are a number of visual clues as to the nature of the haunting which are explained by the end (i.e., it's not just random walking corpses, it's very specific, and I like that kind of detail), and similar to Poltergeist, by the end of the movie our loyalties are a bit split. We want the heroes to escape gruesome death and damnation, but we also sympathize a bit with the 'bad guys,' who have been driven to this horrific end.
A note on the visuals: any schmuck can (and many have) paint a room with dirt and rust. Any pinhead can animate a CGI monster to lurch across the screen. It takes CONFIDENCE to keep the camera ON that monster as it goes. Too many horror flicks these days rely on jumpy MtV-style editing to flash quickly to and away-from the monster, so the audience can never really see it (are you LISTENING, Dark Castle???). The movie makers seem to think this makes it more scary. It doesn't. It makes it impossible to see. It's annoying, and eventually boring. Thank the Gods of Horror Cinema that the makers of Silent Hill had enough confidence in their visuals to show the bloody monsters on screen, sometimes for long sequences, so we in the audience could appreciate their handiwork. This was particularly important since several of the nasties provide important visual clues as to the nature of the haunting going on. Good for them for avoiding a common pitfall.
Grade: A-/B+