I’ve got a complicated relationship with the Silent Hill franchise these days. I absolutely fucking love the original games, particularly the first four, and Silent Hill 2 remains one of the greatest pieces of psychological horror I’ve ever experienced. So when Christophe Gans announced that he was returning to direct a new film based on Silent Hill 2, I was cautiously optimistic. The first Silent Hill film (directed by Gans) isn’t perfect by any means, but it at least understood the atmosphere and visual language of the games. And with the source material of the SH2 game being arguably the strongest story in the entire series, there was a pretty solid foundation to work with. Unfortunately, Return to Silent Hill manages to take that foundation, set fire to it and then piss on the ashes.
The film follows James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), who receives a letter from his dead wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) asking him to return to Silent Hill. He heads back to the town, now largely abandoned after an unspecified illness, and begins wandering around the foggy streets in search of her. Along the way he encounters severely damaged Angela, insane Eddie, innocent little Laura, and sultry Maria, while Pyramid Head and various other creatures make his journey considerably more difficult. Eventually James begins uncovering the truth about Mary, her connection to a cult operating in Silent Hill and the circumstances surrounding her death, before finally confronting what he’s been running from. On paper, that’s recognisably Silent Hill 2. In practice, it’s more like someone remembered the plot after playing the game once and then decided they could probably improve it.
The biggest problem the film has is that almost every significant change to the story is a change for the worse. In the game, James and Mary had visited Silent Hill together before her illness, and the town becomes a manifestation of James’s guilt after he murders her. Their relationship is deliberately complicated, and the truth about Mary’s death gradually recontextualises everything you’ve seen. The film instead has James meet Mary when he accidentally causes her to miss a bus leaving Silent Hill, with the pair falling in love and eventually living a sort of bohemian life together in the town. It’s a completely different foundation for their relationship, and one that I found considerably less interesting.
Mary’s illness is also completely reworked. In Silent Hill 2, her illness and James’s feelings towards it are deliberately uncomfortable and morally murky, leaving you to question exactly what motivated him to kill her. Here, Mary has been poisoned and permanently injured by a cult founded by her father, eventually asking James to end her suffering. James smothers her as an act of mercy, which is certainly tragic, but it removes a huge amount of the ambiguity that made his character so fascinating. The film basically takes one of gaming’s most uncomfortable moral questions and gives it a considerably neater answer.
Even Mary’s letter, one of the most fundamental elements of the game, feels diminished. In Silent Hill 2, James receives a beautiful composed letter from his supposedly dead wife with all sorts of layers, personal history, and hidden meaning. It immediately establishes character history whilst also hinting that something is deeply wrong, and its meaning becomes increasingly complicated as his perception of reality starts falling apart. Here, it’s really just a brief note that serves to get James back to Silent Hill. It’s like it is written by some wine mum summoning her wayward child. The film is constantly explaining things that the game was perfectly happy to leave mysterious, and that lack of ambiguity really hurts it.
The same goes for the town itself. Silent Hill 2 gives the impression that Silent Hill is responding to the people trapped inside it, creating different nightmares from their individual guilt, trauma and repression. The film instead establishes that much of the town has been abandoned because an unspecified illness killed large numbers of people and other catastrophes like flooding occurred. There’s still an Otherworld and plenty of fucked-up monsters wandering around, but the town feels much more like a traditional horror setting than the deeply personal psychological hell it is in the game.
Then there’s Angela, whose story has been substantially altered to fit the film’s new interpretation of Mary. In the game, Angela’s horrific history of abuse is entirely her own, and her journey through Silent Hill is one of the most tragic parts of the story. Here, she’s essentially absorbed into Mary’s mythology, because one tragic woman wasn’t enough. The film eventually reveals that Laura, Maria and Angela are all manifestations connected to different aspects of Mary, which is the sort of revelation that makes you wish the screenplay had discovered the concept of subtlety somewhere along the way.
Laura gets perhaps the strangest makeover. In the game she’s a prickly but innocent little girl who has a genuine connection to Mary and, crucially, doesn’t see the monsters that James does. Here she’s turned into a creepy Victorian-looking child who wanders around with a weird baby doll. Her role is then folded into the film’s Mary mythology, further stripping away what made her relationship with James and Mary so interesting in the original.
Mary’s gravestone might be the funniest example of the film spelling everything out. Her full name is Mary Laura Maria Angela Craner. It’s not even subtext anymore; it’s basically the film standing beside the gravestone with a big fucking arrow saying THESE CHARACTERS ARE ALL CONNECTED TO MARY. Silent Hill 2 trusted the player to put its pieces together. Return to Silent Hill doesn’t trust you to remember four names.
There’s also a particularly bizarre attempt to make Pyramid Head part of James’s literal identity, culminating in James briefly seeing himself underneath the helmet. I understand what they’re trying to do, but it turns one of the most fascinatingly ambiguous monsters in the game into something much more straightforward. Pyramid Head works because of what he represents to James, not because we need to discover that there’s basically a James Sunderland underneath the big fucking helmet.
The climactic flashbacks are another missed opportunity. We’re finally shown the full circumstances surrounding Mary’s death, with James returning to Silent Hill and discovering just how badly she’d been treated before she asks him to end her suffering. It’s supposed to be devastating, but the scene has been so heavily rewritten that it lacks the gut punch of the game’s revelation. And then there’s Jeremy Irvine’s ridiculous fucking beard, which makes him look less like a traumatised man confronting the worst moment of his life and more like some jobbing actor who’s been roped into playing Macbeth in a no-budget production above a pub.
For all my complaints, Irvine and Anderson aren’t the problem. Irvine does a decent job with James considering how little he’s actually given to work with, while Anderson has to carry much of the film’s emotional material while also playing Mary, Maria, Angela, and Moth Mary. There’s clearly effort from both of them, and I actually liked some of their scenes together. Unfortunately, a couple of actors trying their best can’t compensate for a screenplay that keeps dismantling the very things that made its source material work.
Visually, there are also moments where the film gets surprisingly close to what I wanted. Some sequences recreate imagery from the game almost exactly, and I particularly enjoyed the quieter scenes where James is simply wandering through Silent Hill. The fog, ash, ruined buildings and Otherworld occasionally look fantastic, and there are some genuinely impressive creature designs. When the film stops trying to reinvent Silent Hill 2 and just lets the atmosphere breathe, you can see the bones of a much better movie underneath all the bullshit.
That’s ultimately what makes Return to Silent Hill so frustrating. There are flashes of the film it could have been, and Gans clearly knows how to create the visual language of Silent Hill. But he takes a story that already had an incredibly strong emotional and psychological foundation and changes practically every part of it that didn’t need changing. Every time the film has an opportunity to trust the audience, it explains something. Every time the game leaves something ambiguous, the film gives you an answer. And almost every time it changes a character, it makes them less interesting.
I don’t think an adaptation has to slavishly recreate a game to be good. Change things. Rearrange things. Make it cinematic. Do something interesting. But Silent Hill 2 isn’t exactly a game crying out for a new fucking backstory. Its story already works. Its characters already work. Its symbolism already works. Rather famously so. Return to Silent Hill occasionally looks beautiful, Jeremy Irvine and Hannah Emily Anderson are perfectly decent, and there’s enough recognisable Silent Hill 2 imagery here to remind me why I was excited in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s buried beneath a film that takes one of my favourite horror stories and repeatedly explains, simplifies and rewrites it until very little of its original power remains.
Did I mention this film is fucking shit? Fuck you, Christophe Gans.
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