Teaches the viewer how to watch the film then turns into another film.

Rating: 8/10 (26 April 2006)

No real spoilers but I clicked the button just to be on the safe side.
Silent Hill starts as an outstanding experiment and atmosphere, psychological horror, and surreality. Visually stunning throughout, the first half of the film creates the promise of a horror experience as strong atmospherically strong and engaging as such classics as Alien, Jaws, and the Exorcist. Furthermore, the first half delivers on that promise. Silent Hill stands out as one of creepiest films of the last decade without doubt both with its craft and its ambition.
For the first half.
Don't get me wrong. The second half is entertaining, well crafted (especially visually) and ultimately satisfying from the standpoint of a standard horror experience, but it does fail to live up to what started off as one of the best horror films of all time. The story primarily tracks three central characters and does its best when it provides a plot that promises their eventual intertwining.
Unfortunately, after the school sequence, these plots rapidly diverge and the promise of a contained and driven narrative fall away in favor of clichéd arcane dialog and a loss of the emotional core of the filming.
Secondly, the first half of the film, despite complaints by many reviews of the difficulty of following, does a solid job teaching the viewer how to watch the film by providing distinctive and repeated audio and visual cues that establish the rules the filmmaker is following.
Again, however, following the school sequence, these rules largely vanish from the narrative. Gans teaches us how to know what to expect and then he abandons the sense of a living and breathing world that operates in a logical (if surreal) fashion in an attempt to "open up" the story and artificially insert background information that the audience does not need to understand the plot.
However, Gans mistake is small compared to Roger Avery. The minimalistic dialog, while slightly stilted (which is to be expected because of the unfortunately expository nature demanded out of a supernatural or horror thriller), functions perfectly for the first half of the film, telling the audience the necessary information to explain the audio and visual cues the film uses to teach the reader how to understand the film. The surreal is supplanted by the convoluted.
Lastly, I must address the ending. Without spoilers, I can say the film has two climaxes: one plot based the other emotional. The plot based climax coincides with the second half of the film and therefore leaves the audience feeling disappointed and emotionally disengaged. However, the emotional climax caps off the first half of the film quite beautifully, focusing on the psychological complexity of the world Gans and Avery created. If the emotional ending of the film were to follow the school sequence with the slightest of transitional additions, this film would be an outstanding (if slightly short) example of the top of the horror genre.
All in all, I must applaud and recommend Silent Hill as a fine example of horror film making and not because it is simply by far the best video game movie, but the visual and audio elements are without doubt at the top of the film-making craft, the first half is engrossing and engaging, and the second half is still a fine example of film entertainment.