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The Appropriate Tune - "You're Not Here", by Akira Yamaoka
Used to be that the words ‘video game’ and ‘movie’, when combined, produced such a powerful stink that no human being could stand them. A terrible combo it was, the filmmaking side unwillingness or inability to meet the source material on its level mixing perfectly with the studios disinterest in anything besides money. Nowadays of course it’s different, you can sit down to your Sonic or Mario movie with your 55 dollar popcorn, play spot the reference and have a charming 7 out of 10 evening. But those 30 years since Bob Hoskins pretended to be a plumber? Those are the wilderness years, the years that spawned the loudest and also loudest of youtube movie critics the world has ever known. And now, in my hubris, and because I drew the poster, I must see for myself these horrors. I must take a visit to Silent Hill.
Based on the famous Playstation survival horror series, Silent Hill stars Radha Mitchell as Rose De Silva, a mom whose daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) has a unfortunate case of sleepwalking suicide attempts, all the which mentioning a town named Silent Hill. Now most parents whose children have seizures while screaming the name of a town they’ve never been to might try taking them to some kind of ‘hospital’ to be examined by ‘doctors’, but Rose clearly knows better than any experts, so she kidnaps her daughter and takes her to Silent Hill, which will surely cure her of what ails Then her daughter disappears. Then the town goes crazy. So now Rose must traverse this crazy town and find her lost and now in danger daughter, because clearly just leaving her daughter at home with her dad and doing her own investigation would have been way too hard.
I’ve not played a Silent Hill game, but I’ve seen enough secondhand material to have an idea of what the series is. They’re games principally about trauma and loss, where characters are trapped in this surreal, eldtritch place which twists and turns in order to torment them over things they’ve done, or don’t want to admit. Everything about the games, to the way NPCs interact with your character, to the places they go to in Silent Hill, to the design of the creatures they protagonists face, reinforce this detached, tortuous nightmare they are in. Silent Hill the movie…doesn’t do that really? Rose is basically an innocent bystander who stumbled into all this for good-hearted reasons, and while while the movie is technically about trauma, it’s much more personal and I guess humanized, rather than the ethereal tone of the games. Which is okay in a fashion, adaptations aren’t always 1:1 with the source material, but the logic should still be consistent. If Pyramid Head is in the movie, there should be a reason that he’s in the movie, just as there was a reason in the games. If the creatures in the movie look a certain way, there should be a reason they look that way, as there was in the games. Otherwise it’s just form without substance, references for the sake of references, without engaging with what Silent Hill is trying to say.
To give the film some credit, I think the film does quite well aesthetically. Christophe Gans and crew do a good job at capturing the ghostly void of the town, and the industrial decay of the other world. The soundtrack also feels suitably downtempo, and with series mainstay Akira Yamaoka contributing some of the music there are moments in the film that truly feel as one with the games. To take back some of that credit though, the CG looks like ass and they use a lot of it. I was already complaining about CG with Lake Placid so I don’t want to keep going back to that well, but the way they pour it on is just weird. Using CG to do the shift between the town and the other world? Sure, makes sense, I’d even say they do it well. But why are you using CG with Pyramid Head? Pyramid Head is a buff dude with metal on his head, I’m fairly certain just having a real buff dude there for the five minutes that PH is on screen would have been a lot better and cheaper than however much you had to pay to get a computer to do it. Same goes for the other monsters, which all look like they could be done naturally but are instead done with CG and look kind of shitty.
So if Silent Hill the movie doesn’t do anything that would satisfy those who like Silent Hill the game, is there a reason to watch? Not really. I mean there are a couple movies out there about towns you shouldn’t go to to out there to choose from, and movies that more competently evoke a surreal, dreadful atmosphere. The visuals are okay, the music is okay, the acting is okay, everything is just okay. That was enough for it to warrant a sequel I guess, studios will do as they will, but it arouses no passion in my soul. You’re probably better off just watching a longplay on youtube. Or, you know, playing the games yourself.
STATUS: NOT RECOMMENDED
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