Creepy and atmospheric - Truly worthy of the Silent Hill title!

Rating: 9/10 (16 August 2006)

After a really shaky start and some really appalling acting in the opening scenes the movie (a homage to the bad acting in the first game perhaps?) quickly redeems itself and hits you in the face with the city many of us have come very familiar with in the past years. With an added freshness and a new twist. The movie captures the essence of the games perfectly. It uses genuinely creepy atmosphere instead of shock-horror. An atmosphere that never really is lifted, but alternates between absolute nightmare of the Darkness and a feeling of general uneasiness and unsafeness of the Limbo. The very thing that made the game so effectively scary. The story itself is as mysterious as it should be, complex and not-all-there. Though what I found captivating in the first game was that the story was not told in whole and that you had to piece the hints together yourself to get the grand idea of what the heck you just experienced. The movie, obviously, is made to be more easily understandable, while still requiring you to use those precious braincells that normally are left in limbo with horror movies of this scale.
Music was spot on most of the time. Most of the tracks were directly from the games and rest were original, strangely not by Akira Yamaoka himself considering how deeply intertwined his music is with the franchise and how much Gans himself admitted to liking his works.
What I found slightly disappointing was how little screen time the Red Pyramid had in the movie. Since he was such a pivotal character in the second game, and hands down the coolest bad guy in gaming history.
A slightly biased 9 out of 10!