Rating: **
Review Date: 1/23/26
Producer: Samuel Hadida
Director: Christophe Gans
Music: Akira Yamaoka
Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson, Evie Templeton
"Silent Hill 2" is considered one of the best video games of all time and is a masterpiece of psychological horror. It is a story of grief, guilt, and punishment, with an increasingly broken and unhinged protagonist who turns out to be a monster. It's very frustrating to see the film adaptation stray so far from the original concept, and even more of a shame since director Christophe Gans did such an excellent job of capturing the whole look and feel of "Silent Hill" in the first film.
James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) has been deeply depressed since breaking up with his girlfriend, Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson). His psychologist has been working with him to move past Mary, but he continues to be drawn back to her. One night after a drunken brawl at a bar, he receives a mysterious letter, supposedly from Mary, asking him to return to their "special place" in Silent Hill because she's in some kind of trouble. He immediately sets out to find her, but the entire town is abandoned, flooded, and covered in ash and thick smoke from a forest fire. The few people that he runs into are either sick or deranged and want nothing to do with him, except for a trashy woman named Maria (also Hannah Emily Anderson), who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mary and tries to distract him from his quest. And then there are the monsters...
Just like in the game, James's reality switches from the fog-shrouded town of Silent Hill to the hellish Otherworld, but the film also interjects a third reality that breaks immersion and reinforces the idea that the other two versions of Silent Hill are merely mental constructs of James's tortured mind. As the film progresses, we learn that Mary is tangled up in the weird cult of Silent Hill, and that leads to her demise. James's sin is portrayed as a mercy killing rather than an act of selfishness, anger, and hatred, and in the end he's forgiven and redeemed instead of punished, which completely misses the point of what the game was all about. The final insult is the jarring and annoyingly inappropriate happy ending. Who thought that was a good idea?
I really wanted to like this film, but it's a disaster no matter how you look at it. While Gans has an eye for the aesthetics of "Silent Hill," it's tonally inconsistent and disjointed, and the radical departure from the original story severely hurts the plot. Rather than being a mystery about a guy who receives a letter from his supposedly dead wife, we have a story about some crazy guy who's pining over his girlfriend who may or may not exist, and may or may not be alive. And said girlfriend is also somehow rolled into the sexually abused Angela (again Hannah Emily Anderson) and the innocent Laura (Evie Templeton) as well, which makes no sense. Perhaps every inhabitant of Silent Hill is some form of Mary? That might make sense if Silent Hill is only a delusion, but what about Eddie and the homeless guy? Mary is also a sacrificial lamb of The Order instead of just being a normal woman with a terminal disease. Bringing The Order into the film adds nothing but confusion, unless it was an attempt to tie into the previous films.
The monsters are also disappointing. Pyramid Head is back as James's personal punisher, but his modified helmet design is ugly. The other CGI creatures are uninspired, and the lying figures look disappointingly janky. The mannequins have been replaced by a single female spider creature, which does battle with Pyramid Head in a far less effective way than the game portrays. Likewise, the nurses that are especially symbolic in SH2 are relegated to a simple rehash of the previous nurse scenes that we've seen before, and represent nothing other than a surprisingly boring chase sequence. There are so many half-baked concepts, unfinished ideas, and WTF moments in the film that it feels like the filmmakers were lost in the perpetual fog of Silent Hill rather than James. And bringing the real world psychologist into the mix ruins what little narrative there is to begin with. Rather than having James discover for himself what brought him to Silent Hill, we have the doctor trying to explain it to the audience. "James, none of this is real. It's just all in your head." Why didn't they just stick to the story? Was this the director's fault, or did the producers step in and demand certain changes like they did with the original film? Either way, the film is a missed opportunity and the bungled execution doesn't do it any favors. Leaving the theater was definitely a "Street Fighter" (1994) moment for me. All I could do was shake my head and wonder, "What happened? How did this go so horribly wrong?" It's not Uwe Boll bad, but it's close.
Low budget notwithstanding, the film reminded me a lot of the live action "Ghost In The Shell" (2017) in that some scenes and moments are brilliantly realized from the source material, but then the story goes in a completely different and infuriating direction. Even the music is baffling, as "Letter From The Lost Days" plays during the closing credits. That was Heather's song from "Silent Hill 3" and has nothing to do with James, Mary, or SH2. If anything, they should have used "Laura's Theme," but then again, Laura wasn't who she was supposed to be. It was just another bad decision in a very long list of bad decisions. I would be a lot more forgiving if the film made an honest attempt to adapt the original story, but "Return To Silent Hill" is not the return I was hoping for and I can't recommend it, even for die-hard fans of the series.