'Silent Hill'—Atmosphere Is Everything

Hello, and welcome back to Second Chances where I shine a flashlight on the maligned, forgotten, and ignored.

If there's one genre of film in which professional critics seem to disconnect the most from the general audience, it would be horror. I've looked up reviews of many horror films and seen many of the same complaints crop up over and over again like unlikeable characters, overreliance on gore, and lack of concrete stories. While those things can be problematic in other genres, they're much more forgivable in horror due to the nature of the genre. Unlikeable characters getting killed off is seen as karma in action. Gore taps into primal fear very effectively (though, to be fair, a little goes a long way like with the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre). Finally, if a story is too solid and explainable, it stops being scary. To illustrate this, I'm going to talk about a horror film that didn't deserve to be critics' tortured gimp, 2006's Silent Hill.

This movie is based on Konami's horror video game series that I already talked about before. It is a loose adaptation of the first game, which I gladly consider one of my favorite games of all time. Needless to say, when the first trailer released, I couldn't help but be skeptical. Though I've gotten enjoyment out of a few of them, most video game movies suck much worse than movie video games ever did. However, when I saw it in the theater with Ally, I was impressed. Watching it again this past week, it still got a lot right.

The set-up is mostly similar to the first game. Rose (Radha Mitchell) is taking her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) to the lakeside town of Silent Hill. She loses control of her car trying to avoid a girl who walked into the street and crashes. When she comes to, she discovers Sharon is gone, and she enters the foggy town to look for her. She soon discovers the virtually abandoned town has two sides, one that's unpleasant, and one that's a literal hell. Where the movie's plot diverges from the game has drawn ire from fellow fans, but I didn't mind. Adaptations can screw up if they're too similar to or too different from the source material, and I think this film found a decent middle ground. While a couple of performances from Jodelle Ferland and Alice Krige who plays the cult leader Christabella were rather cringey, most of the acting was quite decent, especially from Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean (playing her husaband Christopher), and Kim Coates (as Officer Gucci).

I can understand some of the critics' issues even if I don't agree with them. They complained that the story was too hard to follow. In some ways, I agree. There are plenty of callbacks to the games as well as gratuitous fan service, like the appearance of the infamous Pyramid Head. As she had not played the games at that point, I had to explain a few things to Ally when we first saw the movie in the theater. They had issues with the lack of subtlety, especially with the cult. I have no problem with that. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think every movie needs to have sympathetic antagonists. Sometimes having villains that are easy to hate just makes sense. Finally, many critics had a beef with the ambiguous ending (which I won't spoil). Horror movies shouldn't have concrete resolutions; if they did, they wouldn't stick with the audience. Would The Shining be the horror masterpiece that it is if it didn't have that WTF conclusion?

If there's one thing that the critics praised that easily make this a worthwhile watch, it's the atmosphere. Anyone who's played the games knows that they rely more on keeping tension on the player rather than shocking through jump scares, and this movie easily delivered on that front. The camera work always keeps you on edge through weird angels, and the set design made the Otherworld feel like the hell it should've been. The creature designs were spot-on without overusing CG. The effect when the town transforms was so impressive, it's no wonder it got used in the later games. This is all complemented with the chilling score which includes tracks from the original composer for the games Akira Yamaoka (who's also one of the movie's producers). The fantastic atmosphere easily make up for the deficiencies elsewhere.

While movies based on games are generally bad, Silent Hill is easily one of the better ones. Christophe Gans put together a movie that, while not all that scary, does keep an audience tense and asking questions until the end. It still looks and sounds fantastic, and it still has plenty of decent performances. I don't think it deserved the critical bashing it got. While it may have limited appeaal for those who hadn't played the games, I still think it's worth another shot this Halloween.

What do you think? Any other movies that deserve a Second Chance for Halloween? Let me know, and take care!