Unusual, if nothing else

Rating: 5/10 (27 September 2006)

"Silent Hill" is a very unusual movie. It doesn't follow a traditional narrative and the reason for this is, of course, that the story is based on a computer game. This is apparent throughout and one of the major flaws of "Silent Hill".
Having never played the game - I'd love to but I never got round to buying a PS2 - I was puzzled by a lot of story details. Basically, we just follow a character around as she meets various monsters whose existence is never explained. There's no real tension whatsoever since we don't really know what's going on. The weakest part of "Silent Hill" is that in the last third the makers try to literally explain the background in a long flashback scene. That's sloppy film-making right there and it doesn't completely clear things up, either. Some fan summaries and interpretations have finally shed some light on the story for me, but I guess that all in all the main purpose of "Silent Hill" - the game and the movie - is not to tell an intriguing story but to creep the viewer/player out. Does the movie succeed at that? Yes and no. It's proved once again that a good storyline is necessary for there to be tension, and tension is necessary for us to be scared. Creepy characters alone don't make a genuinely scary horror movie.
Having said that, "Silent Hill" includes some pretty good moments. One involves a person getting her skin ripped off, another barbed wire and a lot of blood. And I've never seen someone burning alive on screen in detail, either. Director Christophe Gans doesn't shy away from gruesome exposition and that's cool, but not enough to make this an exceptionally memorable movie. And although the CGI in the movie isn't half bad, too much of it kills the atmosphere.
Fans of the game will probably love "Silent Hill". It definitely is one of the best video game adaptations so far (which is probably not saying too much). Still, as a movie on its own I would hardly recommend this feature to anyone with only a casual interest in the horror genre.