The new version will raise questions among viewers.
"Return to Silent Hill" is a new installment in the adaptation of the cult series of psychological horrors. The video game Silent Hill has long established itself as one of the main pillars of the genre, and Silent Hill 2 is considered one of the best in history. When the rights holder Konami announced that Christophe Gans, who directed the 2006 film "Silent Hill," would take on the sequel, many gamers were pleased, although there were also those who were cautious.
James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) has been drinking and seeing a psychologist for a long time, struggling with a painful breakup with Mary Crane (Hanna Emily Anderson), whom he nearly hit a few years ago on the road near Silent Hill. The unfortunate encounter marked the beginning of a relationship that clearly ended tragically, although James doesn't quite remember how and why. Therefore, when he finds a letter from Mary at home, he sets off without hesitation to search for his beloved in Silent Hill, where they spent several happy years together. Upon arrival, he discovers that the town has changed beyond recognition: due to prolonged forest fires, everything is covered in ash, residents have been evacuated after water contamination, and the place is in complete decline. As if that weren't enough, shortly after James arrives, he encounters real monsters — not a play on words, but full-fledged creatures. Finding Mary under such conditions is quite the task.
French director Christophe Gans directed the adaptation of the first game 20 years ago, but even then he wanted to work on the sequel. In interviews for the previous film, he admitted that he sent requests to the rights holders for nearly five years before he obtained permission to shoot, and he only received the last approval after he made a half-hour video explaining what he wanted to show the audience and what he believed Silent Hill should look like on the big screen. Gans was convincing enough to not only get permission to adapt the first part but also to return to filming later — this time with the coveted sequel.
The 2006 "Silent Hill" was a controversial film: it was almost unanimously panned by critics, while audiences were divided into two camps: some appreciated the altered aesthetics and increased level of violence, while others criticized the film for its nonsensical dialogues, foolish characters, and questionable changes to the story. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Gans had his own vision: he knew exactly what and how things should be in his Silent Hill and adhered to this with remarkable meticulousness — even where it seemed that nothing needed to be changed. A striking example of this is the replacement of the protagonist Harry Mason with Rose DaSilva (Radha Mitchell). The director justified this decision by saying that Cheryl's father behaved unmanly — constantly fainting, screaming, crying, and generally acting "like a woman." This alone raised serious questions for a considerable number of viewers.
The first adaptation simplified the conflict while adding grotesque and unnecessary elements, some of which could be attributed to the popularity of certain images: for example, the appearance of Pyramid Head, who has no place in the story of the first Silent Hill, was clearly explained by the monster's popularity. Meanwhile, the scene in which he skinning one of his victims alive clearly reflects Gans's personal preferences. The Japanese Silent Hill treated violence with much more respect.
That the director would continue to stick to his line became evident from the first promotional shots and was solidified in the trailers. While the games developed the idea that nightmares are not universal and are more than personalized, Gans continued to scare viewers with the same rusty grates, disemboweled corpses, and an abundance of blood alongside flames. The attractions also did not undergo significant changes: Pyramid Head is back in action and appears again accompanied by hordes of carnivorous cockroaches with human faces and genitals. This could be explained by the fact that this is the same Silent Hill, but even here lies an interesting nuance — this is a different town.
Silent Hill in the 2006 film is an abandoned mining town in West Virginia, as explicitly stated in the film. Silent Hill in "Return" is a resort in Massachusetts. Yet all the aesthetic decisions have been transferred over more than a thousand kilometers without any changes, including the falling ash from the sky — which, by the way, was not present in the games. The aesthetics are used as if only to maintain the unity of Gans's cinematic universe: since the world looked this way in the first part, it should not differ in the sequel. And it doesn't matter that the games followed completely different principles.
Continuing to stick to his line, the director almost completely undermines the psychological aspects of the story of Silent Hill 2. While maintaining form, he radically changes the content: familiar monsters appear on screen but are completely devoid of the meanings originally embedded in them and serve as mere attractions. A similar story occurs with the characters: formally, Gans did not forget anyone, and in the film, James meets a small but important cast of characters from the original story. However, they have been rewritten beyond recognition: some serve different functions in the story, like the girl Laura (Ivy Templeton), while others simply drop out for lack of necessity, like the overweight young man Eddie (Pierce Egan). The changes reveal the director's lack of taste: the aforementioned Laura was almost the only bright character in the dark and melancholic story, while in the adaptation, she has turned into a completely clichéd demonic child meant to instill fear.
As if that weren't enough, Gans introduces the Order — the local religious cult of Silent Hill, which was absent in Silent Hill 2 but was remembered by many from the first part of the series. In the 2006 film, Gans depicted the horrors of religious fanaticism and made them almost the central force in the unfolding story, while in the sequel, it becomes… a poorly explained terrifying force with unclear motives that disrupts the lives of James and Mary. What the cultists do and why is simply not explained, and demonstrations of their rituals are insufficient to understand their meaning. In the end, the Order remains a simple scare tactic and just another attraction among other inexplicable but visually appealing elements in the film.
If you read interviews with Gans closely, it becomes clear that in this case, the term "visionary" used in reference to the director should be taken almost as an insult: he may work for years on storyboards, but he hands the script over to others, demanding only visual conformity with his images and allowing dialogue changes right during filming. Because of this, the characters in both adaptations seem lifeless, and their journey is often devoid of any internal logic. This is not necessarily a minus in the case of James Sunderland's story, which lies on the shaky border between fantasy and reality, but there are a couple of significant "buts," the main one being that "Return to Silent Hill" openly contradicts itself regarding whether what is happening on screen is real.
Individual scenes hint that the "cursed" Silent Hill is nothing more than a figment of the suffering hero's imagination. Others, meanwhile, explain the scale of the disaster in detail and reveal the details of what happened, pushing toward the opposite interpretation. The details do not come together: there is a feeling that viewers are left with disparate pieces of two puzzles that need to be somehow assembled into a single picture. And this is not even about conformity with the games — it is about the film as an independent work, which continues to crumble at every turn and simply does not function as something complete. Interestingly, all of this can be explained by the simple fact that Gans himself confirmed at the time — the film was conceived back in 2001, shortly after the game was released. The context is important here: upon release, Silent Hill 2 was poorly received because it… was not understood.
While Silent Hill offered a complex but more comprehensible story, where there was overt evil in the form of the Order and its esoteric practices with the summoning of a sinister God through child sacrifice, Silent Hill 2 cast aside all the "devilry" in favor of exploring the darkness within man. For a time, the plot was still attempted to be interpreted through familiar images and concepts from the previous game, which turned a story based on ideas from Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" into a laughingstock with demons from the depths of hell. And this is what Gans tried to pull off by bringing the Order back into the story, simplifying all psychological depth, and reducing the conflict to a simpler and more comprehensible situation. The inconsistencies between interpretations clearly do not matter to the director, and he calmly leaves them to the audience, inviting them to decide for themselves what took place in a story where the line between reality and fiction blurs, and what actually happened in the end.
If "Return to Silent Hill" had been released shortly after the 2006 film, it might have had a chance to gain some love: it heavily relies on past material and offers nothing new. Unfortunately, 20 years later, such a throwback from the past looks not just archaic but almost mocking — especially against the backdrop of the remake of the game released two years earlier, which managed to preserve all the key aspects, expand the story, and treat the author's ideas with respect. Gans demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of what he is working with, and the lack of a coherent marketing campaign suggests that the rights holders understood this as well. One can only hope that the director will not be allowed to continue to mock the series — although he has already expressed a desire to adapt Silent Hill 4: The Room. For now, Gans's "Room" resembles the efforts of the infamous Tommy Wiseau.
