I was pretty excited about “Return to Silent Hill”. Only last year had I made the time to finish the remake of Silent Hill 2, so I was looking forward to seeing an adaptation of the story on the big screen while it was still relatively fresh in my mind.

The first two movies

I was only a teenager when the first Silent Hill movie was released. I never had the pleasure of playing the original games, so I have no idea how the movie was received by fans who have played the game, but it seemed like a pretty solid movie to me. It wasn’t just a solid movie, it was like a cultural phenomenon, most kids in my highschool had seen it and if a group of teenagers was out at night you could scare the shit out of them by playing that air raid siren sound on a phone. So yeah, I think it stuck pretty well with people.

Sure it took some liberties with the lore, pyramid head was not supposed to be there, but whatever, it was cool, and it was awesome. At the end of the day a 6.5 rating on IMDB for a horror video game adaptation is pretty high.

So when I heard director Christophe Gans would return for “Return to Silent Hill” I had pretty high hopes. He did not direct the second movie, “Silent Hill: Revelations”, which I will be honest, even having seen it more recently than the first one, I could not tell you much about it. Judging by the IMDB rating, it was not as good as the first one. I do remember it having an interesting twist at the ending but that’s it.

Silent Hill 2

Besides a demo of “Silent Hill: The Room” and like two hours of the first Silent Hill poorly emulated on the inadequate PC I had at the time, I haven’t had the pleasure of fully playing any Silent Hill game.

Silent Hill 2’s remake on Steam changed that. I’ll have to take you through a short overview of Silent Hill 2’s main plot points and themes so that we have a baseline with which to compare the movie to.

Warning! Past this point there be spoilers

The story of Silent Hill 2 follows the anti-hero protagonist James Sunderland who has received a mysterious letter calling him to Silent Hill, sent by his dead wife Mary, which James thinks has been dead for 3 years now, after passing away from nondescript spouse killing disease plot device (probably cancer)

The first person he encounters when arriving in Silent Hill is Angela. She is also searching for something in Silent Hill and warns James that the town is dangerous.

James meets Angela

Once inside the town, he begins to encounter strange creatures which are hostile, dangerous, sickly, but also possess some weird feminine features. While passing through an abandoned apartment building, he encounters Eddie, who seems to have stumbled into Silent Hill while running from the cops. In the same building he also re-encounters Angela which is suicidal, and a little girl Laura, who seems to know Mary and is also seemingly unphased by the strange occurrences in Silent Hill. In this same apartment complex is where we also first encounter Pyramid head, another manifestation of Silent Hill that drags a huge unwieldy blade, and that seems to have its ire pointed at the other monsters as much as it is pointed at you.

Eventually he reaches a park, a special place mentioned in Mary’s letter, where, he meets Maria. Maria looks exactly like Mary but James is unphased by that, and it doesn’t get brought up until much later. From this point on Maria will accompany James in most locations while at certain times she will vanish or be indisposed in some room.

To make a long story short: James has to pass trough many trials, locations and puzzles in his search for Mary. Each location after being completed is usually followed by an otherworldy upside-downy version of the same location, but much more damaged and hellish than the “normal” locations. After the apartments he must travel to the hospital where Mary was treated, a prison, whose significance to James was not entirely clear to me, but is where James has to fight and kill Eddie, a place called the Labyrinth, which has some weird non-euclidean geometry stuff going on, where eventually he gets to kill a representation of Angela’s father and finally arriving at the Lakeview Hotel, which is where James and Mary spent their honey moon.

After finally reaching the room in which they spent the honey moon, the truth is finally revealed to us: Mary wasn’t dead for 3 years, James had smothered her with a pillow, just a few days ago. Depending on how you played the game this is either interpreted as some twisted act of mercy killing, or an enraged murder by a frustrated James. The search for Mary and the letter was a delusion he indulged with, unable to cope with what the had just done. After this revelation you get to escape from a burning Lakeview Hotel and reach the final boss fight where you fight a representation of a bed-ridden Mary. After defeating her you get one of the few possible endings. There are three main endings, two joke endings and a secret ending that is hard to get and requires a second playthrough.

The three main possible endings are: Leave - arguably the best possible ending given the situation, James accepts his actions and moves on, leaving Silent Hill behind. In Water - unable to cope with his guilt, James takes the car and dives into the lake, where it is revealed Mary’s corpse was on the backseat all along Maria - James leaves, but Maria (which is a weird twisted version of Mary created by Silent Hill) goes along with him in the car

If you’re not accustomed to Silent Hill, after reading all this, and probably if you only saw the movies, there’s probably a lot of questions and what the fucks left. In my opinion, Silent Hill 2 is certainly more about the journey than the ending. It’s a captivating narrative with a great atmosphere that keeps you glued to the seat, wanting to solve the mystery of Mary’s letter. The ending in comparison, is probably not very satisfying.

What the hell does it all mean? Well, the gist of it is, at least according to consensus, is that Silent Hill got very fucked up after the rituals related to Alessa. The rituals and her psychic powers have turned the place in a sort of sentient, hell on earth sort of deal, that acts as a magnet to people with unsolved trauma and guilt. Jokingly referred to as Silent Hill therapy. James is called to Silent Hill due to the guilt of killing his sick wife. Maria is a creation of silent hill, a version of Mary that is sexy and desirable, as James was sexually frustrated. The monsters have feminine traits also due to James sexual frustrations. Eddie gets stuck in silent hill because he ran away after just shooting a guy. Angela is stuck there due to the trauma of having been sexually assaulted by her father. Laura… is just a kid, she does not see the version of Silent Hill that the adults see. For her, there are no monsters, there is no fog, no pyramid head, she’s just a kid playing outside in the town. And pyramid head is a representation of James’s dark side and frustrations, and the violence he inflicted on Mary, that’s why he is often seen attacking the nurses and other monsters.

Pyramid head doing... something

The Movie

When the movie was announced, I was looking forward to it. I didn’t bother watching a trailer as I knew pretty much what I was getting into. Unfortunately, like many other movie adaptations of beloved games, the movie has taken some liberties…

I get it, compressing video game stories that span 10+ hours in under two hours can be hard, so sure, some things need to be streamlined or glossed over, however it seems like most movie adaptations change stuff for change’s sake.

Let’s start with the casting: While for Mary I guess they did make some sort of effort to have Hannah Emily Anderson look at least a little like the game’s Mary, James is just some random brunette guy with wavy hair. What is even weirder is that Jeremy Irvine’s IMDB pic looks closer to James Sunderland than in the movie. Angela’s hair looked pretty accurate, while her jumper in the movie is black instead of the cream colored one she wears in the game. But there was something off and I did not realize until the ending why. It’s because she’s also played by Mary’s actress.

James

Mary

"Angela"

Then there’s all the changes to the plot. We get to see how James met Mary. James is portrayed as a painter who is also some sort of playboy, barrelling down the street in his convertible while smoking a joint and runs over Mary’s luggage while she was waiting for a bus out of Silent Hill. We will later learn that she had really good reasons to want to get out of Silent Hill but I guess James’s appearance made her change her mind and they get together and start living in Silent Hill.

The movie progresses in several alternative layers. There’s one layer filled with flashbacks, that shows us James meeting Mary and their life together. Another layer is James returning to Silent Hill which basically tries to cover the events of the game, and there’s a third layer, which represents the outside / real world for which for some reason the movie decides to waste precious runtime on showing us.

Tethering James to the outside world is his Therapist, with whom James has several phone exchanges while he’s exploring Silent Hill.

The Therapist

Throughout most of her scenes she is shown in this weird multiplicative reflection which serves no purpose but to be annoying to watch. I have no clue (ok I have one) why they thought this addition was important to the story. One guess would be that she’s some sort of audience surrogate, so James describes Silent Hill without talking to himself, but it seems more like a kludge than a solution.

In various flashbacks we learn the Mary’s surname is Crane and this is very important because apparently her father was some weird cult leader in Silent Hill. And all of Mary’s friends seem to be members of this very weird cult that makes Mary attend weird ceremonies where they drug her and they think they are channeling her father through her and then they feast on blood poured on her is some weird squicky sexual ritual. JUST WHY?! We later learn that this ritual is what has been slowly killing Mary and made her sick. WHY? It seems like they really wanted some sort of out of the conundrum that James simply killed his sick wife, so they had to invent all this bullshit about a cult and a ritual to make him seem more sympathetic? Great, the problem is that this turns a multidimensional complex character in a generic horror movie victim character. The movie outright tells us with zero room for interpretation that Mary outright asked James to end her suffering. Something that is much more ambiguous in the game.

While exploring Silent Hill, James meets Eddie, similarly to how we find him in the game. Puking into a dirty toilet. This is the first and last time we see Eddie, which also looks nothing alike the game version.

Eddie

Then we meet Laura. There are many problems with Return to Silent Hill’s Laura. First issue, is that instead of the joyful, blissfully unaware child that she is portrayed as in the game, movie Laura is a very generic, tropey, horror movie creepy-child cliche.

The other problem is that this Laura sees the fucked up version of Silent Hill, she sees Pyramid Head and the Monsters, while the game made it clear that for Laura, Silent Hill was just a normal town.

There is a third problem with this movie’s Laura, but we’ll get to that later.

"Laura"

A bit later James meets Maria. For which at least they did make some effort for her to look at least remotely similar to the game Maria, but she does seem like a mix between the original Silent Hill 2 and the remake’s Maria.

"Maria"

Not much to comment about her, but the movie spends like 0 time building up any sort of chemistry between Maria and James. When they reach the hospital she just beelines to a random recording on a table giving us exposition about Mary’s illness and prognosis, based on the drugs that the cult has injected her with. UGH!

Hearing this recording causes James to flashback and remember when he snuck up on one of the cult’s meetings and he saw what the cult was doing to Mary. I forgot to mention that ever since arriving at Silent Hill, James gets these weird migraines where we get to hear the Silent Hill siren sound and a high pitched ringing while whatever surface James touches starts turning in the Otherworld version of the scene. This is something that happens multiple times throughout the movie and has zero explanation. In the game the transition to the otherworld was just something that happens, not something James controls, but whatever, moving on.

Then we get a short action sequence where one of the game’s most iconic monsters finally show up: The Nurses. This is the only scene where we get to see Nurses. The nurses injure Maria, and while sitting injured on a gurney she makes James admit that she looks just like Mary.

Then Laura shows up and for some reason James is convinced Laura can lead him to Mary. Laura leads James into a room and locks him inside, where some weird monster mannequin mummy thing starts choking James and puts her hand down James’s throat. We later learn that this monster is a representation of Mary (which looks nothing like the Mary/Maria boss we fight at the end of the game).

James getting choked causes him to suddenly wake up in a hospital bed. This bringing us back to the real world layer of the movie. A nurse informs James that he is in the Hospital at Silent Hill. The Therapist shows up and tells him he needs to let go of Mary: “She’s gone. She’s dead James. She’s been dead for months now. You know that”. Then she leaves, we get another flashback in which we see James be an abusive asshole to Mary, and then he leaves her alone in Silent Hill. Afterwards we’re back at the hospital, the therapist is trying to reach out to James while he’s staring out the window, and just like that James seems to will himself back into Silent Hill, waking up next to Maria.

Where do I even begin. It seems the movie is implying the whole movie is some sort of delusion taking place entirely inside of James Sunderland’s head. The most asinine boring and stupid plot device ever. It was all just a dream… While it’s hard to argue whether the movie would have been any better be removing all the “real world” B plot, at least it would have been shorter.

With 0 reasons and chemistry build up, Maria takes James’s head, tells him she never told him her name and kisses him. Whatever, let’s just get it over with.

James then takes Maria to what seems to be the Labyrinth level, where the walls are strewn with James’s painting of Mary. He tells Maria that Mary is not dead and that she is not real, then he just puts his hands to his temples and focuses really hard in order to summon Pyramid head and kill Maria… ok…

"James channeling the power of anime"

We then get another flashback that spells it out that Pyramid head is James. Then he’s drowning, then he suddenly wakes up on a beach right in front of Lakeview Hotel. Inside he finds a very creepy contorting Laura that tells James the greatest secret of them all.

Ok...

Are you ready?

The most insane part of the movie

Mary Crane's full name was MARY ANGELA LAURA CRANE all along! Have your expectations been subverted yet? WHAT A FUCKING TWIST AM I RIGHT?

Just what the fuck were they thinking?! There is no objective reasons for this change. And hell if there’s any insane interpretation of the game where this would make sense. This is just some weird asspull. I don’t know if Christophe Gans came up with this, but he sure did sign off on it. I wonder if they brainstormed if they can squeeze in “Eddie” in there somehow, and hell why not “Maria” too. Mary Angela Maria Laura Eddie Crane. I think there are some cultures where people are sort of named like this, right? I bet the writers were really proud of this one. I have to wonder, is this how the first Silent Hill movie was for those that played the first game? Judging by the IMDB rating, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

He then finds “Angela” in a room, muttering to herself “You’re disgusting” while hands come through the sheets and grab her thighs. If this was supposed to be the reveal that Angela was SA’d by her father, they were really fucking subtle. James then gets pulled trough the sheets and we get to see the Abstract Daddy, one of the bosses of Silent Hill 2 that represents Angela’s father. But in this movie instead, the abstract daddy has the head of Mary. Why? Fuck you that’s why, stop asking questions, just turn your brain off man. Clearly it was Mary that was assaulting Angela that was actually Mary all along.

Suddenly, all the shit’s on fire yo! James runs trough the flames and gets teleported??? on top of the hotel where they spent the honey moon and we get a final flashback where we see a dying Mary. James returned to her after abandoning her in Silent Hill when he learned she was dying. And she asks him to end her suffering.

Then we get to see whatever the hell this is:

Mummy Mary tells James to forgive himself, then he takes Mary’s body out of the hotel, throws it in his burnt up convertible and drives into the lake. So I guess for the movie, the canon ending is “In Water”

Oh you thought this was the end? No, because like all modern movies they get screened to focus groups, and I bet the focus groups were not too happy with that ending. So they add some insane time travel loop shenanigans where James is back in the car when he first hit Mary’s luggage, and this time he gets to make the right choice to take Mary out of Silent Hill. So what the hell is even happening? Is the ending just James’s dying dream? How could it be, as it was revealed to us that James is in fact NOT in Silent Hill, unless him waking up in the hospital was the delusion. So many questions, so little answers. This usually makes a movie compelling, but I hope I do not sound too harsh when I say, when a movie is crap, unresolved plot points are not compelling, they’re just the cherry on top of the turd pile.

Why?

Why do video game movie adaptations almost always suck? I get it, you have to compress twenty plus hours into less than two hours. There are things that happen in video games which are very expensive to adapt, or simply unadaptable. But it does seem at times the names attached to these movies just have huge egos.

The quality of shitty video game movies is not something inherent to the genre. I think it’s simply hubris, coupled with the fact that “prestige” movie producers probably don’t want to touch video games with a ten foot pole. So you end up in this scenario where you want to adapt a license, because there’s a huge fanbase, but you think video games are shitty and not art, or that you are smarter and better as a movie maker than those dirty unwashed video game developers, so you start changing shit for no reason according to your needs and wants. And that’s how you end up with these piss poor adaptations that are hated by everybody.

Some recent examples include: The last Resident Evil live action movie, the cancelled Resident Evil TV Series, all the other Resident Evil movies (but the first ones at least were fun) Borderlands, etc. I actually can’t think of a single Video Game movie adaptation that actually followed the story of the game without major unnecessary changes.

I get it, some video games get adaptations and they don’t really have much material for filmmakers to work with. Like Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat, so in those cases it is excusable that they have to make stuff up. But Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Assassin’s Creed, they each have compelling stories that should be adapted exactly as they are (just cut out the gameplay part) because they should be experienced by people who for various reasons do not or can not play those games. By not doing a faithful adaptation, you’re basically completely shitting up a sometimes once in a lifetime chance to expose a compelling story to a fresh audience.

And I have seen it done well. In both cases. HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us seems to have done a pretty good job adapting the story of the game. I will admit I have not played the games as originally they were Play Station exclusives, but I did my research and they seem to follow the two game’s stories mostly beat for beat. Maybe the secret is to make a series so that you can better flesh out the characters and plot, but I think Silent Hill would have been a simple enough story to tell in two hours had the focus stayed on the right things. There are some comments to be made about casting choices, but whatever, at the end of the day they delivered the story.

As for the case when there’s not much story to work with, Arcane has shown that you can take the designs of characters in a fucking MOBA of all places, and place them in a compelling universe and have them animated so well that they out-act live action actors (of course I assume performance capture is involved, but I digress)

I know I’m mostly screaming in the void here, very “old man screams at clouds” energy. But I do hope one day I get to see a Video Game adaptation that just tells one of the stories I grew up with, beat for beat, that would be great. There have been rumors floating around about adaptations for Bioshock and Deadspace, I do really hope they’ll be more like The Last of Us and less like Silent Hill.