Return to Silent Hill (2026)

Having received a letter from his dead wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) returns to Silent Hill, the place where they were once happy (or actually weren’t more often than not going by later flashbacks), but that is now consumed by recurring quotes from the videogame this adapts, which appear with little rhyme or reason and are completely divorced from the rich metaphorical quality they had in the game. Also, lots and lots of these flashbacks, establishing things that don’t need to be established, while also showing us things that make the idea of James returning to Silent Hill for any reason utterly preposterous.

Despite the amounts of harsh criticism thrown at Christophe Gans’s return to the Silent Hill franchise (sorry), I went into this one with a degree of optimism. Gans’s first foray into the world of Silent Hill did take some years to be appreciated, after all, and this does attempt to adapt an absolute masterpiece of a game rich in suggestion and ambiguity which also manages to be richly metaphorical in every part of its design.

However and alas, I can’t imagine any reappreciation happening to this abomination, a film that manages to at once overexplain everything and be nearly completely incoherent, that attempts to squeeze in every single bit of iconic imagery of the game – there are way too many shots that attempt to reproduce damn cut scenes – while clearly having not the faintest idea what that imagery actually means. As an adaptation, this seems to have been created by someone without any comprehension of the material they are working with – which is curious since this is made by the same guy who clearly did show such comprehension two decades ago.

But then, this doesn’t feel at all as if it was made by the same Christophe Gans who made Brotherhood of the Wolf or Silent Hill – or hell, even Crying Freeman. There’s none of the visual flair on display here that once was the director’s strength, nor of his ability to present bullshit with such conviction it becomes utterly captivating and even rather convincing. Instead, this version of Gans can’t even handle simple establishing shots properly.

Though, it has to be said, Doppelganger-Gans and his Return to Silent Hill do manage to provoke the kind of reaction in me that doesn’t happen all that often these days when it comes to movies – they make me genuinely angry.

In short: Necronomicon (1993)

Every couple of years, I re-watch the Brian Yuzna-produced Necronomicon, asking myself – making a ridiculous and puzzled face, I suppose - why I don’t remember anything at all about it beyond the fact that Jeffrey Combs plays Lovecraft in the film’s wrap-around segments. Then, having watched the film, I realize I don’t remember anything about it because it’s far from a memorable movie, which in turn will of course lead to another round with it in five years time, unless I take a look at this useful post right here.

Because I’m a rather relaxed person when it comes to that sort of thing, I can’t even get angry about a film supposedly based on three Lovecraft tales generally having fuck all to do with the stories. I’m really rather more interested if the segments in themselves are any good. Alas…

Yuzna’s wrap-around tale is a good bit of fun, with Combs being Combs, Lovecraft being a rather two-fisted version of himself that is as much Indiana Jones as the old gent from Providence (pretend I’m now blathering on for ages about the man’s racism, because clearly that’s relevant and worthy of burning hatred when talking about a man who died in 1937), and the plot being silly, short, and with neat monster designs.

Christophe Gans’s highly gothic tale of a man (Bruce Payne) mourning the death of his wife, and nearly repeating the mistake of an ancestor (Richard Lynch), is probably the high point of the film. Sure, it has nothing whatsoever to do with The Rats in the Walls which it is supposedly based on, but the motives – if not its emotional base in love, one of Lovecraft’s least favourite emotions – it uses are very much Lovecraftian, and Gans is pretty great at building a mood that does resemble Corman’s Poe adaptations to a pleasant degree, until everything is wrapped up with fine monster designs and a shift towards nearly swashbuckling action that is the sort of thing the later director of Le Pacte des loups did already so very well at the time this was made.

I am a big admirer of Shusuke Kaneko’s 90s Gamera, perhaps the best kaiju eiga made after the original Gojira but his segment here is just a mess, finding neither a visual, nor a thematic nor even just a plot focus, with little happening in it that isn’t obvious, and nothing at all that’s interesting, unless you were always dreaming of watching David Warner in an awkward sex scene. On the more positive side, this segment does actually use plot elements of Lovecraft’s Cool Air, just not sensibly or to any effect.

Last but not least, we have Brian Yuzna’s segment, which is a very typical series of ever more grotesque effect scenes, the kind of thing I find entertaining enough as long as I’m in the process of watching it – particular with creature and, well, stuff design like it is here – but that not really makes for a satisfying climax when the grotesque isn’t in service of anything. Again, it’s no surprise I won’t remember any of this in a few years.

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A few thoughts about the Silent Hill movie

When Silent Hill came out in 2006, many critics (even some of those who actually understand genre films) were exceedingly underwhelmed by it. I never understood exactly why, but re-watching it gave me some ideas:

• It's a videogame movie, and because videogames are unworthy and juvenile, a movie derived from a videogame cannot be good.
• Many people are still unprepared to embrace artificiality in films. A film like this, which is dominated by a very conscious artificiality in set design, camera work and acting (although I admit some of the actors could just not be all that great) is something not everyone can appreciate.
• Silent Hill's plot is so loose it is basically not a plot at all. But in the context of a movie about a woman entering a place that is an extended metaphor for her subconscious, plot shouldn't be (and can't be) handled in a traditional way.
• The film has no interest in its few male characters. The male-lead sub-plot is its greatest weakness. That is of course perfectly all right with me.
• Characterization is handled in a weird way, less by the actors emoting (which they do anyway), or their reactions to the things they see, but by the way these things relate to them, a little like in Argento's Inferno.
• Not everyone is a Silent Hill fanboy like me.

 

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