‘Our place. Our town. Our love…’
I didn’t think it was possible to create a horror remake as pointless as Renny Harlin’s excretable take on the The Strangers franchise, but then along comes Return to Silent Hill as the second turd in the toilet bowl of cinema. The first Silent Hill, based on the popular video game franchise and released way back in 2006, did a fantastic job in bringing the nightmarish visuals of the source material to life. This dismal sequel has none of that film’s ingenuity. Indeed, my main emotion whilst watching Return to Silent Hill was a longing to return to the 2006 version – a film that is superior to this one in literally every sense…
When James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), an alcoholic painter, has a chance encounter with Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson) at a gas station, it sets in motion a series of events that will see James marauding around the insidious ghost town of Silent Hill. Basically, I’ve you’ve seen the original, you know the plot to this piece of shit.
Everything about Return to Silent Hill is bland. Irvine’s performance is like a tub of grey paint come to life and given an Instagram haircut. It is preposterous to think that this character could be an alcoholic. He isn’t interesting enough. He is utterly nondescript in every conceivable way. Despite having spent 106 minutes in his company, if Irvine was to break into my house tomorrow and stick his finger up my arse (thankfully an unlikely prospect), I still wouldn’t recognise him. Aside from Irvine’s non-performance, the narrative is nonsensical and Christophe Gans’ direction is flat and uninspired. How is it that Gans, who also directed the first film, can make what is essentially the same film again but much, much worse? The dialogue is insulting. The plot totally lacking in anything resembling tension or suspense. The only thing that saves Return to Silent Hill from a zero score is that some of the practical effects are genuinely excellent.
This film ultimately feels like watching a 106-minute video game cutscene from the mid-2000s. This is not a compliment. There is staying true to the source material and then there is creating a pointless facsimile of it. Return to Silent Hill emphatically does the latter. Avoid at all costs.
