Silent Hill 2 is one of my favourite pieces of horror ever made.
And, as someone who has little life outside the spooky, it had to beat out a lot to get there, you know? I played this game as a teenager not long after it came out, and it’s stuck with me ever since; that distinct, oppressive atmosphere, that dark storyline that unfolds so beautifully through imagery and character development alike, the twist ending that still stands up after all this time. Seeing its recent renaissance with the 2024 remake was a joy, watching people discover this game for the first time and offer new perspectives on this endlessly rich story. I love it, and I think I probably always will.
And let me tell you what I don’t love: the Silent Hill movies. Not that that will come as much as a surprise to anyone who’s been around these parts for a while – Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelations are down there with my very least favourite films of all time, and much of that is down to the dreadful start that director Christophe Gans got them off to in the trudging bore of 2006’s Silent Hill adaptation. So when it was announced that Gans would return for a new adaptation, this time of Silent Hill 2, I had my doubts, to say the least.
On paper, it looks like a familiar plot: James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) returns to the town of Silent Hill after a letter from his deceased wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson, who also plays Angela and Maria) calls him back to their special place.
The film takes some major divergences from the game, which isn’t, inherently, a bad thing. The game itself is so cinematic and so iconic (especially with a recent and highly-considered remake) that to just adapt this story straight would feel a bit redundant. There’s room to explore here, in the rich world of Silent Hill in general and the second game in particular – you don’t have to exceed the game, you just have to make sure that the new aspects you’re exploring are, you know, moderately interesting. Which is where Gans flubs it completely.
Because this film, in short, is a fucking bore. It’s nearly two hours of insufferable, borderline incomprehensible leaping about between a love story surgically excised of chemistry and connection and a horror story whose terror mostly comes in the form of the remaining runtime. The script is spectacularly weak, with nobody able to communicate in any way vaguely resembling a person – we leap about through timelines and worlds with little connective tissue in between to tie it all together, the surrealist nature of the Otherworld used as an excuse for downright nonsense. The romance plot between James and Mary – if you can even call it that – is very much a case of “smushing two vaguely attractive dolls together”, as we’re told over and over again how important they were to each other while Gans only really bothers to show them kissing wetly on the mouth before James promptly abandons her after discovering her abuse at the hands of her father.
Of course, a lot of this comes down to the performances, which are dreadful across the board, but none more so than Irvine as James. When he’s not curling his lip like a confused cartoon dog, he’s jogging with a remarkable lack of concern away from the town’s hideous monsters or grunting down the phone to his therapist (Nicola Alexis, who is, I can only assume, insisted on being shot through a kaleidoscope for the first third of the movie, because why else would that choice be dropped at complete random). Anderson gets a bit more credit here, because at least she’s playing three one-note characters instead of a singular one, but she doesn’t stand out in any of her roles.
And, I presume in an attempt to streamline the film, Gans crams all the game’s female characters into Mary’s story, turning Maria, Angela, and Laura into different versions of Mary (the only way I would have forgiven this is if they’d had Anderson also playing Eddie as a particularly pizza-centric aspect of Mary’s psyche, but that might have been moderately entertaining, so they couldn’t risk it). I’ve written quite a bit about how much I love Silent Hill 2’s female characters, and what a nuanced and interesting approach I think the game takes to the various women who fill out this world, and it’s such a shame to see them all concertinaed into a single character here, with a few iconic moments cherry-picked to exploit for trailers without really getting into the meaningful weight behind them. Particularly egregious in this regard is Laura (Evie Templeton), who is turned from an unsettling bastion of normalcy against the backdrop of the brutal surrealism of the town into a generic creepy little girl.
The town itself is…pretty good, I guess. The film’s visual identity is about the only high point (medium point?) for me – Gans has a decent eye for a striking image, and there are a scattering throughout the film alongside some shot-for-shot reconstructions of in-game moments that pulled me right out of the movie. The monster design is hit-or-miss, with Abstract Daddy and the Bubblehead Nurses really knocking it out of the park, and the rest…also there, I suppose. The set design for the town itself is solid enough, but it never truly feels oppressive the way it needs to, as if James could just hop into his Mustang and drive out of there whenever he wanted.
The choice that most irritated me, though, in this new version of the story that Gans et al have crafted from the desecrated remains of the game, is introducing the cult as the major antagonists of the story. Now, there are several Silent Hill stories that feature the cult as excellent antagonists, don’t get me wrong, but this story just isn’t about them. The cult were a feature in Gans’ initial movie, and I understand his desire to create a sequel to that aspect of his first Silent Hill adaptation, but for me, it misses the point of Silent Hill 2 entirely. I think one of the reasons the game has remained such an enduring piece of psychological horror is because of the lack of supernatural motivation in many of the characters – sure, the setting and monsters are far from grounded in realism, but the things that have driven the various characters to this purgatory to contend with their emotions are, fundamentally, real. James’ grief and guilt over the loss of his wife, Angela’s agony as she suffers the trauma of her prolonged abuse and the measures she went to in order to escape it, Eddie’s defensive state after years of bullying – what drives the story is not some magical cult pulling the strings, but human reactions to pain that’s decidedly relatable to many people.
That’s certainly why Silent Hill 2 hits as hard as it does for me, why it remains such a challenging and interesting piece of horror storytelling more than two decades later – because it’s driven by the humanity of the characters and their motivations, and leaves the audience to decide whether their choices are for better or for worse. Handwaving away those tough moral questions to “uh, her dad was really, really shitty and also part of a cult that was poisoning her so James was doing her a favour by smothering her to death!” is such a cheap cop-out, I almost can’t believe the film missed the point that badly. James is a great protagonist because we are never truly given an answer as to whether he was acting out of mercy, selfishness, anger, grief, or some combination of the above when he killed his wife – for the story to give us a clear-cut response to that is downright insulting.
Return to Silent Hill is, truly, an insufferable piece of shit that not only defangs the complex story of the game but fails to add anything interesting to it in the process. It’s boring, bland, and badly-made in so many ways it almost feels incomprehensible that it could have made it this far without someone noticing how much it sucked, but here we are. A disservice to an iconic game and an all-time low in Gans’ already-questionable career, Return to Silent Hill is what will be waiting for me under a pyramid helmet when I eventually make it to that town.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Flickering Myth)
No But Listen 