What popped into my head midway through watching Return to Silent Hill was a very specific thought: this film feels like a child showing me their terrible artwork from school and me saying “yeah great.”
But in reality this is a terrible mess of pasta and glue.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Return to Silent Hill misses the mark by some way.
I’m going to start with the positives — and unfortunately there aren’t many. The trailer proudly describes Christophe Gans as a visionary director, and I do think he is. His filmography may be small, but his vision is unique and he has done some genuinely strong work over the years.
And in fairness, there are moments where Return to Silent Hill looks wonderful, particularly during its location shoots. There are some striking camera angles, elegant camera movement, and a handful of well-composed shots that really help parts of the film look good. At times, the CGI and special effects are also fairly decent. I especially liked the first transition from the fog world to the other world, which looked genuinely effective. I must commend the team for attempting such a special-effects-heavy horror film on such a low budget.
That said, the film still disappoints.
First of all, the script. At times it feels like it’s been written by an alien, an AI, or translated from another language entirely. The characters in Return to Silent Hill simply don’t speak like real people. “She’s the apple of her father’s eye,” one character gleefully tells our protagonist, James. Even allowing for the fact that this character is meant to be a strange cultist, the line still feels deeply unnatural. And that problem runs throughout the entire script.
This also feeds directly into the performances. Across the board, they feel wooden and stiff. No one really stands out particularly well. I will, however, give a nod to Hannah Emily Anderson, who plays Mary (and also Maria and Angela, for some reason). She manages to juggle three roles reasonably well. Another performance that deserves praise is Evie Templeton, who plays Laura and portrayed the same character in the recent Silent Hill 2 remake video game.
James, unfortunately, feels like the most egregious example of the film’s problems, largely because he has the most screen time and the most dialogue. Jeremy Irvine is not a bad actor, but he is having a very tough time here. The script and direction do him no favours, and the performance never really clicks. I hate to point out poor acting, as I do feel that everyone is doing the best with what they’re given, but what they’re given isn’t very good.
And I understand this is a low-budget film, but his wig looks rough, and that beard honestly looks like something you could’ve picked up from Partyland in the 1990s.
Christophe Gans and the team behind Return to Silent Hill clearly wanted to appeal to fans of Silent Hill 2, the game the film is based on. Much like the first Silent Hill movie, this is done through visual recreation — camera angles, compositions, and specific moments lifted almost directly from the game.
The opening section, particularly James’s arrival in the fog world version of Silent Hill, leans heavily into this. The area where he parks his car, the barriers blocking the tunnel, the toilet block where he examines himself in the mirror — these scenes are almost shot-for-shot recreations of the game’s cutscenes. His walk into town along the narrow path features some genuinely nice tracking shots clearly inspired by the game.
But despite all this, it never feels like Silent Hill 2.
The adaptation feels fundamentally different, and as much as it tries, it never hits the same notes. The key themes of the game — guilt, repression, and grief — are barely explored here, and when they are, they’re approached in a very different and far less effective way. Ultimately, Return to Silent Hill utterly fails to capture the tone and atmosphere of Silent Hill 2. This isn’t a new problem. I don’t believe any Silent Hill film so far has successfully captured the heavy, lingering dread of the games.
The games place the player alone in an unfamiliar town, shrouded in fog, constantly guessing what’s around the next corner. On film, there’s a detachment. Watching a character run from scene to scene just feels like watching a series of events unfold. There’s never a sustained sense of tension here, and the film relies far too heavily on sudden loud noises and jump scares, only one of which really works.
The Silent Hill series has always leaned heavily on symbolism. Silent Hill 2 was no exception, with Pyramid Head acting as a manifestation of James’s self-punishment for his past actions. The film attempts something similar, although now presenting Pyramid Head as a version of James himself — his anger, his guilt, his belief that he has become a monster.
But it never lands. The symbolism is far too blunt, completely lacking the subtlety that made the game’s approach so powerful. Multiple times we see James’ face through a crack in the Pyramid Head itself, as if to really ram home the metaphor that James is a monster. We get it, it just doesn’t work.
The monster designs themselves are actually pretty good. Christophe Gans went to the lengths of bringing back the choreographer from the original Silent Hill film to work with dancers and performers, and visually the creatures look solid. However, they’re badly underused.
Pyramid Head appears sporadically and is never allowed to feel like the overwhelming presence he should be. The nurses get a brief, unimpactful scene. The Lying Figures — the monsters that spit bile from their torsos — return, as do the cockroach swarms from the original game, though here they look a little silly.
Pacing and structure are other major issues. Like other Silent Hill films, this one feels like James is simply moving from location to location, ticking off story beats. In a game, getting lost is part of the experience. Watching someone else do it is mostly frustrating, and it never builds into anything thrilling or frightening.
The relationship between James and Mary is where the film truly collapses. Their relationship never feels believable, and their chemistry is almost non-existent. Mary’s motivations are especially confusing — she’s determined to leave Silent Hill after years of cult abuse, only to meet James at a bus stop and immediately return to the town to continue that abuse. It makes little sense.
This is just one of the many significant, ill-advised story changes.
Rather than James murdering Mary in frustration, the film reframes events around Mary’s involvement with the cult and strange drug rituals, which leads to James leaving Mary in Silent Hill and alone during her eventual illness. It ultimately weakens James’s guilt, turning it into regret over abandonment rather than responsibility for his actions.
This also affects other characters. James meets Angela, Laura, and Maria — all revealed to be versions of Mary. Maria, in particular, is badly mishandled. In the game, she’s James’ idealised version of Mary, seductive and mysterious. Here, she’s barely explored before being killed off for reasons that are never convincingly explained.
Characters pop in and out with little impact. Eddie Dombrowski, a Silent Hill 2 favourite, appears briefly and then disappears entirely, serving no real purpose.
The plot ends up being a jumbled mess and ultimately inferior to the game’s story. In Silent Hill 2, James is forced to confront the truth about himself. In this film, he’s portrayed as a fundamentally flawed man who eventually does the right thing.
The finale initially gestures toward the game’s most powerful ending — James driving into the lake — before abruptly undoing it. Time resets, James meets Mary again, and this time takes her to the city instead of Silent Hill.
It’s a bit of a wet sandwich of an ending.
I’m not angry — I’m just disappointed. While Return to Silent Hill tries to tell a new story, it doesn’t satisfy fans of Silent Hill 2, and it’s unlikely to work for newcomers either. There’s ambition here, and some good direction, but it’s undermined by a weak script, mixed performances, and some generally just very strange decisions.
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