Not enough invested in the characters

Rating: 7/10 (3 February 2013)

Carrie, The Evil Dead, Hellraiser, Eraserhead, Salvador Dali, Tetsuo, Ring, Christian Iconography and Witchfinder General are just a few of the sources that you can see either influencing this film or being directly quoted. As in his previous film, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, Christophe Gans has tried to make a film that isn't quite like anything else you've ever seen whilst using the conventions of many different genres. In this case he has also based the entire thing on the the video game Silent Hill and tried to absorb the characteristics, or clichés, of the game genre. The result is unlikely to completely satisfy fans either of his previous film or of the games, although some of the fawning on IMDb suggests that the gamers are mostly happy with the results.
I have to say that I found the film quite hard to like simply because the gore quotient was set to maximum and then some. In terms of blood, violence and general trauma to bodies human and demon this raises the bar in an already competitive field. Usually I have no objection to high gore levels although they are often used to hide underlying deficiencies in a film. In fact I don't object to the level of gore displayed here – I just find that somehow Gans (or the CGI specialists) have somehow managed to take to the fun out of it! That might sound like an odd thing to say but in the best splatter movies there is an almost unholy joy to be had in watching the slicing and dicing. Just think of those moments when you simultaneously think "Oh no this is just too gross!" but burst out laughing because what you have seen is audacious and, yes, downright laugh out loud because you don't know what else to do with your emotions. Here the scenes are just gross and I think, on reflection, that I have this reaction because I had nothing invested in the characters. If only a little more effort had been made in the setup to make me care more about the heroine and her daughter and later some of the characters encountered in Silent Hill then I would have felt much emotional attachment and the gross-out feelings would have transferred to worrying about the characters and made them seem more acceptable. Weird or what?
However, much as the experience of watching this film was unpleasant, I also have a terrific admiration for the way in which the nastiness and the kinetic energy of the game experience was conveyed so effectively. I still think that Gans has the capability of making films like no other western director – his sensibilities and eclecticism put me much more in mind of Asian martial arts or anime films than they do of anything coming out of Hollywood. It's also worth saying that some of the sequences and images really stay with you after the film. This is a rare experience in a time when the next film off the conveyor belt gives you a rush the day you see you but is forgotten the very next day when you try to remember what was so good about it. As a failure then this film is considerably better than the average movie and I look forward to Gans next film.
Other things you may learn by seeing this film are a) Sean Bean cannot do a convincing American accent and b) not all little girls are capable of looking frightening by being bug-eyed and failing to comb their hair properly.