There’s an admirable loyalty, maybe even poetry, in a film-maker returning to an unpromising, barely there movie series 20 years after his first crack became a minor hit. The horror film Silent Hill, based on a video game of the same name, has garnered a cult following in the decades since its 2006 release, but it’s not exactly a genre classic nor beloved franchise, with a single little-seen 2012 sequel to its name – until now. Return to Silent Hill brings back the first film’s director, Christopher Gans, for a new story set in the same ash-strewn ghost town, this one based on the Silent Hill 2 video game. Characters in these movies tend to wander into a place that is obviously haunted or cursed, refusing to leave even after it becomes clear that they should, and only decide to escape after it’s too late. Maybe Gans can relate.
Or maybe he’s the only man for the job because no one else will take it. That could almost describe James (Jeremy Irvine), the hapless protagonist of Return to Silent Hill. After a chance traffic-accident meeting with Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) that unconvincingly thwarts her attempt to leave home, the two fall in love, and after a time James even moves to Mary’s oddball town; as a painter, he can go anywhere (though if there’s a reason that Mary couldn’t leave, given that she was already ready to hop a bus when they meet, I missed it). Despite the movie skipping over what makes them so instantly compatible, James is all in; someone has to be.
Apart from their meeting, most of James and Mary’s relationship is depicted in flashback throughout the movie, which initially lends it some doomy romantic intrigue lacking from the first film. We know, based on early scenes set well after their first meeting, that at some point Mary and James will be separated, sending him into a state of desperate anguish. In the midst of this wallowing, he gets a mysterious letter drawing him back to the town of Silent Hill, implying that Mary is there somewhere. When he arrives at the entry road and finds a tunnel blocked off, James is undaunted, and sets off on a footpath. When he makes it to town and finds it barely populated and covered in ash, he cannot be dissuaded from poking around. When a filthy, sore-covered man takes a break from vomiting into a rusty toilet to tell James that the city is “one big cemetery”, our hero all but shrugs, and bravely presses forward.
It turns out, making a horror movie where the hero is more casually curious (or oblivious) than scared is a tricky proposition. James’s stubborn forward stumble is supposed to indicate his obsessive dedication to Mary – though you’d think that someone so fixated on his ex would realize when he’s meeting a mysterious woman (Anderson again) who looks just like her, only with, uh, blond hair. (Mary also has blond hair.) Still, for a little while the parallel tracks of past, where James has a growing unease with Mary’s bizarre “family”, and a present, where he’s haunted by figurative and literal demons, give Return to Silent Hill a stronger sense of purpose and mystery than it really deserves. As it goes on, however, the movie increasingly consists of James wandering around a visually distinct landscape and encountering different weird sights.
In other words, 20 years later Gans still can’t figure out how to escape the open-ended confinement of gameplay, or even give it the forward momentum of a game with a mission. There’s certainly some “cinematic” imagery here, like a horde of gross creatures that look like a cross between shaved rats and xenomorphs from Alien, or even less fantastical stuff, like how James’s therapist (Nicola Alexis) is seen almost exclusively in fractured-mirror fragments for the first half of the movie. But the flashback material does a terrible job establishing any kind of real-world baseline, which makes the whole enterprise feel like a ghostly hallucination, lessening the impact of the scary stuff.
Maybe it’s precisely that dream-world ambiguity that has drawn Gans back to Silent Hill. If that’s the case, James really does feel like an avatar for his director: convinced there’s something of substance here, ignoring all the warning signs to the contrary. Nothing left to do but check back in another 20 years.
Return to Silent Hill is in cinemas on 23 January
