arrogant, pretentious flick only saved by its production design

Rating: 1/10 (23 April 2006)

OK, great monsters (thx tatopoulos), nice photography (thx laustsen), and cool set decoration (thx nikolakakis) but the result is a pretentious drama, extremely boring, with no intensity, no depth (excuse me, but the mother-child theme is pretty ridiculous and the evil/faith one is so cliché...)and over all NO EMOTIONS!! all this due to a director with a lot of ambitions but no guts that forgot that the Silent Hill videogames were over all visceral games. Here, you get a nicely shot flick, sometimes beautiful indeed, but never captivating, intense or disturbing. Sorry but the games were complex, hardcore, gore and really really disturbing. here the director has a great universe but it uses it to create conventionnal scenes (the toilets, the blade attack of the pyramid head, the flashbacks with an 8mm movie. we've already seen that a hundred times!!). Worse, each time great creatures appear, they're gone 30 seconds later. Instead, you get two actresses spending their time walking in hallways with a flashlight, and a completely useless sean bean, present during looooong scenes only to make us understand his wife is in a parallel world. I didn't know we were so dumb... And the climax, my god, it's grotesque. The bonfire and the "burn the witch" thing...it seemed like the witch scene in Monty Python Holy Grail... but at least, holy grail was funny...