Review of Silent Hill (2006) by Daniel B — 06 Jun 2012

"Some towns should never be entered.".

A woman goes in search for her daughter, within the confines of a strange, desolate town called Silent Hill. Based on the video game.

REVIEW.

Weird, creepy and at times plodding yet never dull adaptation of said video game about a young woman (Radha Mitchell) trying to help her daughter's (Jodelle Ferland) plague of bad dreams leading her to the titular ghost town cursed with a secular cult, damned creatures and a never-ending snow fall of hell ash. Laurie Holden is a stand-out as a tough yet compassionate motor-cycle cop who teams up with Mitchell to find her missing daughter. Based on a video game (of which I have no experience), Silent Hill has rather more going for it than the straightforward linear series of obstacles to be overcome which is the usual format of such adaptations.

There is some quite strong story material here, an atmosphere of creepiness throughout (there is something very wrong in Silent Hill, that is clear from the start), some genuinely scary moments, decent effects, and performances of commitment from an excellent cast, with Radha Mitchell's Rose particularly effective as the protagonist. French filmmaker Christophe Gans (who co-wrote the dense script with Roger Avary and Nicolas Boukhrief) has an eye for the sordid surreal ugliness that the film embraces yet allows the CGI production design to overtake the underlining theme of a parent's love that outweighs the price of evil.