SILENT HILL

SILENT HILL
By Ken Leicht

I never played the Silent Hill video game. Come to think of it, I think I’ve never played any of the video games that have been turned into movies except for HOUSE OF THE DEAD. I loved the HOUSE OF THE DEAD game but I despised the film.

I knew nothing about the Silent Hill game other than that I heard that it was creepy. The movie is creepy for sure. The plot bordered on the non-sensical but I was able to go with it. Radha Mitchell plays Rose, a mother whose adopted child’s sleepwalking has become too dangerous to ignore. Discovering that the town of Silent Hill may be the cause, Rose decides to take her child there to find out some sort of answers. She soon wishes that she hadn’t.

Once Rose and the traffic cop who was following her end up in Silent Hill, it soon becomes obvious that they have walked into a nightmare. When the sun goes dark, mysterious creatures spring up everywhere and they are bent on destruction.
Scariest of all is some giant weird guy with a pyramid on his head.

Silent Hill the movie is probably the best film I have seen in this genre in that it really seems to actually capture the experience of playing a game like this. It has the elements of the quest, the clues, the attacking monsters and the menacing bosses. It sort of goes astray later on when it tries to have too much of an explanation for it’s story but not too badly.

Ultimately Rose discovers that her daughter has a more sinister origin than she may have known. She helps her daughter’s vengeful spirit free to wreak havoc on the strange townsfolk who are responsible. To go much further into the plot is pointless since it borders on nonsense. That said, I am somewhat of a fan of the film. I like the nightmarish dream world it creates. Credit goes to director Christopher Gans and writer Roger Avery whose indie and foreign sensibilities make this a more interesting exercise than it likely would have been in the hands of someone more “studio” like Paul W.S. Anderson, for lack of a better way of putting it.