Silent Hill

Admittedly, it being a computer game adaptation, I was expecting Silent Hill to be pretty dreadful. Possibly so bad it was great. Instead, I got a film that was almost an excellent horror film, but held back by some pretty major flaws. I think I would have preferred so-bad-it’s-great, but I enjoyed the film nonetheless, and would say it’s probably the best horror movie I’ve seen in a few years – although it admittedly doesn’t have that much competition.

The premise is great: an adopted child has vivid nightmares, somnambulating to the edge of a cliff and hysterically shrieking about ‘Silent Hill’ when rescued, so her mother resolves to take her there so that she might confront her fears and recover. Okay, so it’s a bit bizarre that these people’s garden backs onto a huge waterfall, but it’s an impressive setpiece! After a car accident on the outskirts of Silent Hill, mother and daughter are separated, and it soon becomes clear that something unnatural is happening in the town, and beneath the usual level of reality is something darker.

I never played the games, which is quite a shame, since they seem like they’d be quite good fun. However, the plot apparently doesn’t draw much beyond basic inspiration and one or two monsters from the originals, so there is no excuse for a bad story. Thing is, it starts well, but degenerates when the monsters come along, and by the long-winded final act, it’s all become rather incoherent and silly – but at least there’s a lot of gore to make up for it!

Aesthetically, the film is excellent. The cinematography is first-rate, from the claustrophobic, oppressive foggy streets and dark rooms to the huge, looming buildings. Everything creates a sense of stifling suspense, perfect for this kind of film. Unfortunately, what lets it down is the CG.

Now, I have a very good eye for CG, having watched its development in the cinema and in video games more or less from the beginning – at least, from when filmmakers began trying to pass of CG as real. Here, the lines were often rather blurred: there was a lot of CGI touch-up on filmed actors, and several sets were lit to look more like they were Computer Generated than they were, perhaps in homage to the games. The sets and inanimate objects created by computer were first-rate, though for such a special effects-laden film, there weren’t very many of them. The way the sets decayed and melted also looked fantastic. The problems came with the monsters.

The first monsters to appear were weird burning baby-things. Weird is good, and they probably looked great in the game, like something out of a Francis Bacon painting. But the CG just wasn’t good enough: they looked like they were made of plasticine. Later, they overlaid weird skin textures on actors so that they could stumble menacingly forward, which looked great – except that the way they moved made it look like they were about to burst into ‘Thriller’. Plus a big close-up of a bug with a screaming face was very ill-advised. They just looked silly.

On the other hand, monsters that were more or less human were far better. The guy whose feet were tied to the back of his head with barbed wire looked great slithering along the floor (even if his tongue thing was a bit silly), and the ‘Pyramid Head’ character from the game was a superb hulking menace, probably the most iconic character of the film.

But the idea of a fanatical religious cult who like to burn witches was very bad indeed – and if you MUST have such a cult in a movie, at least don’t put them in costumes that look like they’re straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail when they’re going ‘Burn her!’, because that’s all the audience will then be able to think of! I can’t deny that a demon from hell with awesome diabolical powers wreaking revenge is a great climax, though – even if things got ridiculously gruesome and violent.

The actors did well with an extremely clunky script, especially Rose (the mother) and Sean Bean, though his character and his entire plot should’ve been left out, as it served no purpose (according to my research, it was tacked on when the readers pointed out that there were no major male characters in the script), and the little girl trying to look evil just made it look like she wanted to be a teeny dominatrix, which I doubt was the desired effect. The butch policewoman managed to make a one-note character very likeable, though, which is to be commended.

The real problem was in the convoluted and overcomplicated explanation of what was basically occult gubbins, dragging out the last act and making the film overlong. But it was better than I had expected, and rather good fun.