Return To Silent Hill Releases With Heavy Dissaproval From Fans and Critics

After a four-month wait, the movie Return to Silent Hill has finally released to some less-than-good reviews.

Currently sitting at a 30 on Metacritic, Return to Silent Hill has not captured the eerie and haunting effect that its video game predecessor did so well. In fact, many reviews from critics like IGN and Slant magazine say that the movie has lost what made the Silent Hill franchise so good in the first place. 

Slant Magazine said, “Christophe Gans’s Return to Silent Hill does away with all that psychosexual nuance. For one, it attributes Mary’s illness to her proximity to a cult. Angela, once a bundle of sadly frayed nerves, is reduced to a generic, mentally ill townie, with the screenplay taking most of her game counterpart’s experiences and applying them awkwardly onto Mary.” 

For those who don’t know much about the Silent Hill video game series, it is set in a regular town built around an irregular lake. In short, the lake is supernatural, and settlers killed the natives who once lived there to build the town of Silent Hill, and it was therefore cursed forever. The movie is based on the second game in the series, where James Sunderland receives a mysterious letter leading him to Silent Hill and to a confrontation with himself. Later in the game, we find out that James had murdered someone close to him and has been living in denial ever since.

What made the video game series so legendary was the subversion of expectations. You spend the whole game thinking you’re in just a haunted town, and then it gets revealed that, in reality, the player character has been transported to another world that is influenced by the main character’s own thoughts, feelings and actions. The character spends the whole game thinking that there is a monster in the fog, but you’re playing as the monster. The film has apparently forgotten this, only giving the main character, James Sunderland, a small emotional arc near the tail end of the film. 

Critics are not the only ones mad at the film’s attempt to adapt the series; die-hard Silent Hill fans are baffled at just how bad it ended up. Haragainsborough on the Silent Hill sub-reddit said, “It was so bad. The CGI was bad, the characters- especially Angela, were butchered. They turned the story into this cult-ritual bullshit that absolutely made no sense. The writing COMPLETELY misunderstands what “Silent Hill” represents. It’s straight up unwatchable. I came in expecting it to be bad, but I didn’t think it’d be THAT BAD. I can’t think of any redeeming quality at all.”

Christophe Gans has had a less-than-successful run directing movie adaptations of the beloved series. He also directed the 2006 movie adaptation of the first Silent Hill game, which received a marginally better reception from critics than his newest venture this year. For such a legendary game franchise and so many successful game-to-movie adaptations we’ve gotten in recent years its a crime that something with as much potential as a Silent Hill movie got left out.

Video games like Silent Hill are among the best expressions of art and storytelling we have today, but critics and fans alike agree that maybe Silent Hill should stay in its silver fog and not live on the silver screen, at least for now.