Fan of the game or not, this is good horror

Rating: 8/10 (21 April 2006)

The simple description of a woman trying to find her daughter, & being faced with a deserted town that turns into a hell, is just that. A simple description. The story within the movie and the game is far more complex.
Silent Hill (SH), being based on the highly successful video game, could have easily gone the route of so many other cheesy video game movies. Resident Evil, Doom, and any crap from Uwe Boll.
But director Christophe Gans went another way with the much more complicated story of SH. He decided to implement a bit more perfection to the script, editing the movie to the very end, removing cheesy lines like the girl saying "I am the Reaper" in a deep male voice.
It is obvious that Gans played the game. The surreal look and feel of the game comes through in the movie. Even some of the camera angles are similar, as it swoops over the character in an ominous way. And I can write a page on the attention to detail for the set design.
Using less CGI and more make up and costumes, they got the monsters right too. The evil incarnations from the game come right through on the screen, some ultimately more vicious looking! So will you like the movie? It depends on what you're looking for in a horror. Though fans of gore will love the multitude of the slice, dice and rips that happen in SH, that's not the movie's focus. It's a culmination of a claustrophobia, loneliness, paranoia, inability to determine reality from hallucination, being hunted, and no control over disastrous conditions. It's a formula that works well, and it is leaps and bounds over some similar genre movies.
But it's a more complex story that some may not like, & the ending is ambiguous, though relevant. I invite those that are left scratching their heads by the ending to look into it further.
I also invite you to watch other movies that helped shape the story for the game and movie. Rent Jacob's Ladder, David Lynch's Twin Peaks, perhaps the 1960's Village of the Damned, or read Stephen King's The Mist.
But if you really want to be creeped out, before or after seeing the movie, how about a dose of reality? Research the very real Centralia, PA. Take a look at some images. They will look like they came from the movie. Screen writer for SH Roger Avary researched this American town and implemented some of the occurrences that happened in this town in to the movie. It got so bad that the US postal service revoked it's zip code. Spooky. Sometimes reality is stranger then fiction.