Silent Hill

There is a well-worn adage that film adaptations of computer games can seem like watching a game being played by somebody else. Inspired by a popular series of survival-horror videogames set in a derelict US mining town that is possessed by an evil force, Christophe Gans’ Silent Hill is no exception. With its obstacle-course narrative of abrupt ambushes and perversely hidden clues, and its vividly dimensional visual environments, Silent Hill is a striking approximation of the gaming format. But the bare bones characterisation, rigidly episodic structure and overcrowded frames permissible in first-person role-play prove stubbornly uninvolving on the big screen.

Gans treats exposition with impatience. The opening shows adoptive parents Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) dash out into the night after their sleepwalking daughter Sharon, who leads them to the top of a thunderous waterfall. As Sharon peers over its edge, a vortex to a terrifying infernal realm opens before her eyes. She sees the face of a mysterious doppelganger staring out at her from the flames, before collapsing in her parents’ arms, repeating the words ‘Silent Hill’. Soon Rose is ignoring the advice of her husband and driving Sharon at night to the ghost town named in her reverie, refusing to stop for a curious policewoman along the way, and smashing at high speed through a metal enclosure gate as if to the action movie born. Bean is given little to do during a half-hearted search for his missing family except shout into his mobile. He soon drops out of the story, later to be found napping at home on the settee when Rose and Sharon return battle-scarred. Rose is the resilient mother, Christopher the concerned father; Roger Avary’s script fleshes out neither beyond these archetypes.

Conversely, Sharon’s back-story – her connection with Alessa, the girl-demon tormenting Silent Hill’s paranoid, puritan inhabitants as revenge for burning her alive – unravels at inordinate length. The director, whose period horror movie Le Pacte des loups (2001) also featured a society fearful of supernatural forces it could not understand, at times reaches for the allegorical resonance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in his depiction of a community whipped into zealous frenzy by superstition. He is more at home milking sealed-off-community-with-a-sinister-past clichés: the radios that buzz out of frequency when the town’s borders are broached; the nearby gas station attendants whose eyebrows raise at the town’s mention.

Juggling different time dimensions, Gans uses a distinct visual scheme to separate Christopher’s search for his family – captured in golden, sunlit tones – from the possessed Silent Hill. The moment when Rose realises that the thick grey fog enshrouding Silent Hill is airborne ash from a still smouldering subterranean fire is memorably achieved – a rare example of atmosphere. Less successful are relentless scenes in which Rose is assaulted by a menagerie of deformities. Such grotesquery is not enough to keep a story afloat – unless, that is, the spectator is in control, finger on the trigger.

This review features in the July 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.