Do you have to rewatch “Silent Hill,” the exceptionally good live-action 2006 online game adaptation, earlier than testing “Return to Silent Hill,” a narratively unrelated sequel primarily based on the favored “Silent Hill 2” sport? Sure and no, although for a similar cause: the primary “Silent Hill” film, a creepy and atmospheric temper piece directed by the nonetheless largely unsung journeyman Christophe Gans (“Brotherhood of the Wolf”), holds up very well.
The 2006 “Silent Hill” offers viewers a transparent sense of its supply materials’s attraction. We path after Rose (Radha Mitchell), a troubled mom, as she searches for her sick adopted daughter within the titular ghost city. “Return to Silent Hill,” additionally directed by Gans, delivers a number of the identical moody pleasures as that earlier film, solely its story, about James (Jeremy Irvine), a disturbed painter, and his quest to seek out his spouse Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), usually feels concurrently too mild and acquainted to match Gans’s earlier tribute to Konami’s potently surreal online game collection.
Each of Gans’s motion pictures depend on nightmare logic and attendant disorientation to ascertain their unnerving atmosphere. You definitely don’t watch these motion pictures for his or her dialogue, except you’ve gotten a really particular style for emotionally flat, generally laughably florid exposition (this can be a judgment-free house).
Reasonably, you’re extra more likely to wish to see “Return to Silent Hill” for the sake of watching James discover the city’s deserted streets and varied decaying environs. After that, there’s the thriller of what occurred to Mary, the daughter of the city’s beloved founder and spiritual chief Joshua.
Nonetheless, as followers of the video video games know, a lot of the secondary characters primarily replicate again on James as they every present him with just a few morsels of details about Silent Hill and its doomed residents. Online game gamers are possible used to those background fixtures, which aren’t developed a lot and are sometimes dismissed as Non-Playable Characters (NPCs). Online game gamers will even possible be unfazed by the film’s early scenes, which resemble the video games’ non-playable, pseudo-cinematic minimize scenes, which give a number of wide-angle, god’s-eye views of the city in between scene adjustments.
James’s story doesn’t crossover with the earlier “Silent Hill” film, but it surely does function quite a few allusions to its predecessor and its series-defining highlights. Cockroaches with enamel, spiritual zealots with a purity fetish, and a brolic mute swordsman named Pyramidhead all return to provide what generally looks like overglorified fan service to presold devotees. However whereas “Return to Silent Hill” does really feel like a devoted and sure essentially stripped-down approximation of “Silent Hill 2”’s charms, it in the end pales compared to Gans’s earlier film.
Nonetheless, it’s exhausting to knock a sequel an excessive amount of for touchdown precisely the place its creators appear to have aimed for, particularly when most of its shared references nonetheless have their background-Jumbotron-video-at-OzzFest-charms. Gans nonetheless does a fantastic job of focusing extra on James’s environment than on him, which means that he understands this task greater than most.
You don’t have to care about how James will resolve his considerations for Mary, her oversexed doppelgänger Maria (additionally Anderson), and his mysterious connection to Pyramidhead. “Return to Silent Hill” nonetheless principally succeeds at encouraging viewers to decelerate and gawk with James at varied putrid creatures and their labyrinthine haunts.
Then once more, you would possibly catch a nasty case of deja vu should you’ve seen the 2006 “Silent Hill” film and keep in mind what turned of Rose and her encounters with Pyramidhead, the cockroaches, and a unique batch of spiritual zealots. There’s even an eerily comparable scare scene in “Return to Silent Hill” that includes one other hospital hall filled with faceless, mobility-and-sight-challenged ghost nurses wielding unnecessarily eager scalpels. Wouldn’t it be a “Silent Hill” film with out them? Most likely not. Do these factors of contact nonetheless really feel like an pointless nudge within the ribs for followers and perhaps a useless try at taking part in the hits for the uninitiated? Yeah, sadly.
The worst factor you possibly can say about “Return to Silent Hill” is that it’s not as recent or compelling as its predecessor, a pitfall that may possible not shock anyone who has hoped and even waited twenty years for Gans to make one other online game film. Nonetheless, you would possibly wish to watch Gans’s first “Silent Hill” even if in case you have no plans to see his follow-up, principally as a result of it’s a uncommon online game film that has no downside treating its characters and their personalities because the secondary attracts that they clearly all the time had been. Gans’ sequel delivers extra of the identical, so it possible received’t impress anybody who doesn’t already get pleasure from getting misplaced within the fog.
