Cast
Radha Mitchell (Rose Da Silva)
Sean Bean (Christopher Da Silva)
Laurie Holden (Cybil Bennett)
Deborah Kara Unger (Dahlia Gillespie)
Kim Coates (Officer Thomas Gucci)
Tanya Allen (Anna)
Alice Krige (Christabella)
Jodelle Ferland (Sharon/Aleesa)

If you want your horror movies served up with images ripped from an H. R. Giger-does-Lovecraft science fair project and without legions of ironically quipping teens, then Silent Hill might be the picture for you. Be warned however: it is adapted from a video game.

Sigh. There’s the catch. The good news-bad news routine. For all of Silent Hill’s dazzling design and nightmare look that eschews much of the standard horror aimed at teenagers (recent examples being Game Over and When a Stranger Calls), it runs on the narrative logic of “survival horror” video games, where plot cohesion and motivation matter much less than putting the character (i.e. the person holding the remote control) through a shock corridor as atmospherically as possible. Not only that, but it lasts two hours and five minutes, far longer than most of us could healthily play any video game. How did a video game adaptation end up running over two hours?

Plenty of wandering around helps. A suspenseless non-horror subplot also contributes. Rose Da Silva (the talented but Mitchell, who needs to get a big break eventually, and is so far best known for her role in Pitch Black) takes her daughter, Sharon, on a trip to the West Virginia ghost town of Silent Hill in order to understand the girl’s strange sleepwalking. Sharon was adopted from an orphanage near to Silent Hill, and in her somnambulistic fits, the little girl screams out the town’s name.

But as Rose near the town, she finds out that it has been blocked off for years. The coal fires that caused the evacuation of the town thirty years ago still rage under the surface, and the town is fenced off. In a moment of inexplicable panic, Rose flees a motorcycle cop (Holden) and crashes through the gate into Silent Hill. Sharon disappears and Rose finds herself walking through a derelict town covered with ash and with no means of escape. Periodically, creepy air raid sirens sound and the town plunges into a living darkness that turns the walls to iron frames and sends creepy-crawly grotesques scurrying around looking for victims.

Exactly what has happened to Silent Hill never gets seriously addressed. Rose’s husband (Sean Bean with a mild American accent) comes hunting for her, but finds a realistically deserted town that looks nothing like the one in which his wife and daughter are trapped. Silent Hill must exist in two dimensions, one of which might be a form of purgatory for those who perished in the coal mine fire. These victims belong to a strange religious cult, who hide in a church during these attacks of darkness, and believe it is connected to a freakish little girl names Aleesa, who looks just like Sharon Da Silva…

You start to get the picture. Roger Avary’s script for Silent Hill is a narrative mess. The initial confusion helps create an aura of dread and the unknown as Sharon and leather-clad motorcycle cop Cybil move through the horrific landscape of ash and dilapidated buildings, occasionally falling into squeamish confrontations with the monstrosities of “The Darkness,” including a hulking killer ogre wearing a pyramid helmet the size of the Transamerica Building and carrying the biggest sword this side of Thor comic book. But after a point the film’s obtuseness begins to turn into an annoyance, and the Grand Guignol finale with huge tendrils of barbed wire shredding up the cultists of Silent Hill seems to go on forever while explaining exactly nothing. The scenes with Sean Bean investigating the story from the mundane world don’t add any useful information and distract immensely from the film’s biggest strength, its surrealistically demonic and bleak aura.