Studio:   Cineverse
Director: Christophe Gans
Writer:   Christophe Gans, Sandra Vo-Anh, William Schneider
Producer: Victor Hadida, Molly Hassell, David M. Wulf
Stars:    Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson, Giulia Pelagatti, Evie Jayne Templeton, Robert Strange, Pearse Egan, Nicola Alexis

Review Score:

Summary:

Determined to reunite with his lost love, an unstable man returns to the town where they lived together only to find it transformed into a nightmarish hellscape.

Synopsis:

Speeding along a winding mountain road while smoking a joint, artist James Sunderland’s distracted driving causes him to narrowly avoid a deadly collision with a passing truck. As his convertible Ford Mustang spins out, James’s car damages a suitcase belonging to Mary Crane, who was waiting for a bus to the next town at the same spot. Now unable to board the bus, Mary accepts James’s offer to take her back into the nearby town of Silent Hill. The two of them go on to develop a romance.

Having become an alcoholic due to the end of his relationship with Mary, James’s recollection of meeting her turns into a nightmare that suddenly wakes him from a drunken stupor. After being kicked out of a bar, James takes a call from his therapist, identified only as “M” on his phone, asking him to resume their therapy sessions. James returns to his current home to unexpectedly find a handwritten note from Mary begging him to come back to Silent Hill.

In a heavy rainstorm, James drives back to the spot where he first met Mary and falls asleep at a blocked tunnel. When he wakes in daylight, James begins his walk to Silent Hill through a foggy forest where ash litters the sky. A strange woman named Angela pauses from sandbagging a cemetery from floodwaters to explain the town was destroyed by fires and widespread illness.

James enters Silent Hill to find it eerily abandoned. The church prompts James to recall Mary’s recurring nosebleeds. Another building spurs James to remember his first meeting with numerous townspeople who praised Mary’s family, particularly her father Joshua, for Silent Hill’s prosperity.

James has a series of unnerving encounters with a homeless man who melts, armless humanoids that spray acidic black ooze, and cockroach swarms. A siren is heard along with an evacuation alert over a radio, after which the ashen town transforms into a rust-colored realm with even more dangerous creatures.

James flees to the apartment building where he previously lived with Mary. Experiencing a sudden seizure, James calls M, who subsequently issues a wellness check for James because she is worried that he went back to Silent Hill to look for Mary.

In their old apartment, James recalls coming home one day to find townspeople assembled with Mary in a cultlike gathering involving an occult shrine to her father. In the present, James finds an admission form for Brookhaven Hospital, leading him to conclude that must be where Mary is.

Elsewhere in the building, James encounters an odd man named Eddie and a frightened little girl named Laura. Despite Eddie warning him not to interact with Laura, James does so and experiences another seizure. Eddie begins beating James, but Eddie flees when Pyramid Head, a monstrous brute, appears.

Pyramid Head’s pursuit of James is interrupted by a spider-like lady who fights him. After killing the other creature, Pyramid Head resumes his stalking, but he and James are both debilitated by sudden seizures caused by another loud siren.

James recovers to find Silent Hill returned to its ashen state. Angela cryptically warns James that he cannot save Mary, insisting the town’s secrets should stay buried. James leaves after Angela threatens him with a knife.

Outside the building, James encounters Laura again. Upon James noticing her holding an odd doll she claims was given to her by Mary, Laura runs away. Chasing after her, James loses Laura in a maze in Rosewood Park, but he meets Maria, a woman who resembles Mary and offers to help him search the hospital.

James has a flashback in which he remembers secretly following Mary to an underground lair where Silent Hill’s cult worshipped Mary’s father Joshua as a prophet. James witnesses Mary being forced into the center of a shocking blood ritual whose repeated occurrences resulted in her gradual poisoning.

Back in the present, a sudden siren changes Silent Hill into its otherworldly form again. James and Maria navigate their way through a horde of contorting nurses to board an elevator in the hospital. After treating a wound she suffered in the nurse attack, James leaves Maria to recover while he resumes his search for Mary.

James runs into Laura, who locks James inside a room where he is enveloped by a multilimbed moth monster resembling Mary. James suddenly wakes in a completely normal Brookhaven Hospital where he is greeted by M, who reminds James that Mary is dead and he needs to let go of her to stop suffering psychotic breaks.

In another flashback, James confronts Mary over what he saw in the cult’s lair. In response to his demand that they leave town, Mary reveals she was trying to leave when she first met James, but she returned to Silent Hill because she thought her life could be different with him. James ends up abandoning Mary to leave Silent Hill alone, and he sees cultists watching him from their windows as he drives away.

In the present, moths swarm the windows of James’s hospital room as the siren sounds again. James is returned to the rust-colored Silent Hill where he reunites with Maria. James and Maria end up kissing.

Still desperate to find Mary, James ignores Maria’s pleas and boards an elevator that takes the two of them to a maze adorned with disturbing paintings of Mary. James accuses Maria of not being real. Pyramid Head then manifests and slaughters her. James glimpses his own face beneath Pyramid Head’s mask.

James continues experiencing flashbacks and visions until he wakes up on the lakeshore. James sees the Lakeview Hotel, where he went with Mary on their first trip into town, in flames and enters for another confrontation with Laura. Laura forces James to remember the full name engraved on Mary’s gravestone, which reveals Angela and Laura are alternate incarnations of her.

In another room, James witnesses Angela merging with Joshua Crane to form a mattress monster. After the vision vanishes, James recalls how he helped end Mary’s suffering from her ongoing poisoning by tearfully assisting her suicide.

Atop the hotel in Silent Hill, James watches Mary’s corpse rise into the air and morph into the multilimbed moth monster he encountered earlier. James levitates to embrace her.

Silent Hill returns to its ashen state. James takes Mary’s body to his car, which he subsequently drives into the nearby lake so they can be together in death. While submerged, James sees a truck speeding toward him, which suddenly returns him to the moment when he first met Mary on the road. Excitedly believing he has a second chance with her, James restarts his romance with Mary, but this time they drive away from Silent Hill.

Review:

Being integrally associated with several celebrated titles and a rich history of uniquely atmospheric experiences dating back to 1999, the words “Silent Hill” possess a great deal of power within the world of horror video games. In the world of horror movies? Quite the opposite.

Although director Christophe Gans’s 2006 adaptation of “Silent Hill” (review here) earned nine figures in box office receipts along with a fair share of fans, critics claimed it left a lot to be desired, creating a fracture that couldn’t conclusively rank the film one way or the other. Widespread disappointment was easier to quantify with the 2012 follow-up, “Silent Hill: Revelation” (review here), which scored a pitiable 8% on Rotten Tomatoes and only 35% on the audience-based Popcornmeter.

With the franchise fully off a cliff after only two entries, producers apparently wanted to run it back 20 years to when Christophe Gans planted “Silent Hill’s” stake in cinema with some small measure of success. Unfortunately, Gans’s “Return to Silent Hill” continues to tank whatever meager value remains in a plummeting stock. Instead of recapturing the first feature’s feel with a moody mystery, memorable faces, and nightmarish suspense, “Return to Silent Hill” makes a messy movie out of confusingly cryptic plotting, excessive digitization, and an underpowered cast wearing bad makeup and worse wigs, all so someone can play multiple characters with the costuming and convincingness of an afternoon soap opera.

“Return to Silent Hill” follows the same story as “Silent Hill 2,” the game many players agree to be the best in the series. That story can be summarized somewhat simply, as it follows one distraught man’s attempt to reunite with his lost love in a haunted town whose psychological terrors upend reality. Despite having this preexisting path to follow, “Return to Silent Hill’s” script still credits three writers. Perhaps involving three additional imaginations has something to do with the film version of this single-sentence synopsis getting lost in the clutter of unconnected events and randomly appearing NPCs who disappear just as randomly whenever the screenplay doesn’t know what else to do with them.

“Return to Silent Hill” takes its desire to look like the game it’s based on too literally, to the point where the screen so often seems like PlayStation-rendered images on a PC monitor, it ceases to look like a movie. The falling ash and rust-colored tendrils that give the titular town its signature eeriness are included. But so are digital details on actors noticeably performing in front of greenscreens. It’s a bizarre creative choice to take Silent Hill’s sickly, rotting, otherworldly setting, then glaze it with a shiny sheen of CGI sharpness that’s obviously of artificial origin.

Choosing peculiar creative routes carries over to simpler setups that aren’t even reliant on software-enhanced monsters. Early in the movie, the camera briefly switches to a first-person view while the protagonist, James, gets bounced from a bar, yet the film never repeats this perspective again. James also has a therapist identified only as “M,” who is made more mysterious because she is initially shot as a murky reflection in table glass. But the eventual reveal of her face doesn’t come with any sinister surprise, making this another quizzical method of doing something differently without enhancing the narrative.

Not that there’s much of a narrative anyway. “Return to Silent Hill” mostly pieces itself together out of a series of things happening to James as he merely moves from one moment to the next. A homeless man melts in front of him. Then he’s attacked by an armless humanoid spraying black ooze. After that comes a swarm of mutant cockroaches. A story doesn’t develop from these isolated instances. James just has encounters, like one would in a video game, collecting clues leading to the next location where he might meet a character who could offer a crumb of exposition if they’d only speak in direct terms instead of vague quips.

“Return to Silent Hill” wants to be a heartbreaking love story, except it’s a singleplayer adventure that isn’t even told chronologically. Choppily arranging flashbacks around one man with no consistent companion means we know next to nothing about the tragic romance motivating him, so there’s no emotional attachment to his desperate quest to find a woman we’ve only spent a minute with.

Suck all sympathy out of a main character who has only been depicted nearly causing a collision because of reckless driving, drunkenly fighting his way out of a pub, and moping about his missing girlfriend and what’s left? All that remains for “Return to Silent Hill” are eyes made sore from a pixelated parade of computer-created creatures and a flimsy fantasy more frustrating than frightful. That’s not enough to make an entertaining movie, although it might be more than enough to put “Silent Hill” films back in a coffin for another 10+ years.

Review Score: 40