Silent Hill is a wonderful movie, the best representative -along with the two Resident Evils- of the recently born game-to-film adaptation genre. But that’s not all.
A perfect blending of narrative and atmosphere, of genius and craftsmanship make also Silent Hill one of the best horrors seen in years.
Among many unforgettable sequences, a special mention goes to the introduction of Pyramid Head (coming straight from the Silent Hill 2 videogame) and to a clash that puts the main character against a group of bloodthirsty nurses aroused by light.
Fans of the videogame series will undoubtedly have a hell of a time spotting the infinite references that span all of the four chapters. All the other ones will have to go with just the satisfaction for a horror movie that, finally, totally delivers what it promises.


Inside the movie...

Welcome to Silent Hill.
Welcome to a world without rules, a world which feeds on your most well-kept fears.

It all began with a videogame that appeared on the first Playstation during the ’90s. Konami’s Silent Hill was a game that, unlike many famous horror games that came before it, didn’t focus on splatter imagery, but instead preferred to weave a tale full of atmosphere and anguish.
The original chapter was later followed by three sequels, each perfect in its depiction of fear itself.
And now here comes Silent Hill the movie. A strange, almost alienating work that succeeds in the difficult task of staying on par with its beautiful videogame counterpart. In fact, Gans’ picture manages to further enhance what was already a masterpiece of horror by developing themes that were only touched in the games, by giving supplementary depth to characters and settings while keeping absolute faithfulness to the source material.

Gans is not by any mean an ordinary director: gifted with an enormous talent, he’s perhaps one of the most interesting, clever and inventive movie makers out there. His works have always been surprising: think of the divertissement that was Crying Freeman, or of that crazy, baroque and epic picture that was Brotherhood of the Wolf. This time, he dares even more.
Silent Hill is, perhaps, Gans’ masterpiece, his most elegant, complex and personal accomplishment so far.
Gans’ mimics down to the slightest particular the camera angles used in the original game, he stays true to its story; nonetheless, he makes effectively this story his own, mainly by choosing an unexpected feminine point of view to tell the tale.
While the main character of the game was a father, here we have a mother as the focus of the plot, while male characters make only brief appearances when it’s strictly requested by the economy of the narration.
This choice doesn’t merely reflect the feminist trend which much contemporary horror cinema is undergoing. It rather encapsulates the concept that is at the very heart of the movie: that only a woman’s desire to become a mother can make a birth, or a rebirth, possible.
A concept embodied by the conflict that explodes between two mothers in the movie: a dark mother who wants to bring back on earth an entity which is the very denial of life, and thus of procreation, and another woman who has lost her daughter and must face death in order to become mother again.
Life and death fight until they become one, in a melancholic and surprising ending à la Fulci.
This Alice of sorts walks through horrorland, a dark, sterile world, in search of the light of a son.

It’s interesting to note that parallels with Silent Hill can be found in the excellent Saint Ange, for which Gans served as a producer. It’s probably not a coincidence, but rather a sign of how much the French director cares about those themes that he later reprised in Silent Hill.