If anyone was going to try to adapt Silent Hill 2, one of video gaming’s most spectacular artistic achievements, you could do worse than French stylist Christophe Gans, who directed 2006’s Silent Hill – a loose adaptation of the first game in the series. Much to fans’ chagrin, the film rewrote the game’s story, but it did maintain its eerie atmosphere and disturbingly graphic imagery. Gans’ new film, Return to Silent Hill, is in some ways a much more faithful and loving console-to-theater transformation. We still follow James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), a morose man drawn to Silent Hill by a mysterious letter from his missing wife, Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson).
Gans also returns to the first film’s gloomy digital style, enveloping actors in oppressive CGI fog and synthetic environments. It obviously recalls Konami’s original game, whose technical limitations foregrounded its artificiality, but it’s also a chilling way to emphasize that protagonist James is trapped in a hell of, if not his own, then something’s making. The performances too somehow emulates the game’s awkward, unnatural voice acting, a key contributor to both works’ uncanny dreamlike ambience. Rarely has a film better evoked a PlayStation 2 game.
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Game fans can be precious about Silent Hill 2, and Gans goes the distance to reassure them of his good intentions. Return to Silent Hill follows the game’s structure closely, moving through almost all of its major beats with shot-for-shot recreations of its most iconic images. Yet it does undeniably make some bewildering changes. Many of them simply don’t work at all: One key twist reframes James’ role in his wife’s disappearance in a way that obliterates one of the game’s most challenging narrative elements. Other alterations trade the game’s strange poetry for a disappointing literalism; Mary’s letter no longer begins with the captivating phrase “In my restless dreams, I see that town.”
In other ways, though, Return to Silent Hill feels like a productive reinterpretation of the source material, a new take on its themes and iconography in lieu of a rote recapitulation. The story’s secondary characters, whose original incarnations darkly reflect James’ own neuroses, are rewritten as aspects of Mary instead. For someone intimately familiar with the game’s story, this was a welcome and intriguing surprise. In trimming things down to 100 minutes, Gans gives the story new propulsiveness. Without any of the game’s tension-releasing exploration and puzzle-solving breaks, it has a nightmare flow, constantly upending its own logic and the geometry of its spaces. It denies the audience the brief, comforting respites they expect in other horror films.
Still, it necessitated some trimming. Fans will riot – that’s what they do. But this kind of interpretative adaptation is preferable to the game’s 2024 remake, a slavishly faithful “modernization” that sanded down all of the original’s rough edges. Return to Silent Hill, whatever else you can say about it, produces a fruitful artistic friction. In that way, it understands the assignment.