Return to Silent Hill review: "Neither an impressive adaptation nor coherent enough to act as a standalone film"

I think I'm in Silent Hill at innocent times, like when I'm at the beach, and I see dense fog sneaking onto the water. Quiet moments of mist, rust, and contemplation have been important to the Konami horror games ever since the first Silent Hill established their cruel psychology in 1999. But the vague Silent Hill 2 adaptation Return to Silent Hill is loud and contemptibly unsubtle – more like a foghorn than the fog.

Director Christophe Gans returns to the franchise 20 years after the film Silent Hill, his first attempt at converting the exceptional horror game into a movie theater fantasy. The 2006 film was initially controversial (the critic Roger Ebert wrote about it, "They talk and talk and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain"), but it has since gained cult status for its, at least, bold art direction and putrid yellow atmosphere. "Putrid yellow" is the kind of thing both Silent Hill fans and horror movie freaks like me want, but Gans' Return to Silent Hill is superficial in its appearance and in its soul.

Coffee black, like my soul

In Gans' retelling of Silent Hill 2, alcoholic artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) goes back to the town of Silent Hill hoping to find his ex-girlfriend Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson), though doctors keep coldly reminding him that she's dead.

In drunken visions sometimes incomprehensibly delivered in first-person camera – a smug reminder that this is a video game movie, though Silent Hill 2 is not a first-person game – and sudden flashbacks, James remembers Mary as a mess with a martyr's face. She is both the haloed subject of his increasingly deranged paintings and sinfully devoted to a cult that drinks blood out of her eyes.

They met because, right before she was about to flee Silent Hill, he ran over her luggage in his Ford Mustang while unconvincingly smoking a joint. I couldn't tell, at first, if I was watching a car ad. This embarrassing introduction sets the tone for the rest of the movie, which looks and feels artificial to the point where I could believe Silent Hill is nestled inside a taped cardboard box rather than by a lake.

Nightmare Realm

Stumbling around tight hallways that still look fresh with black paint, James spends much of Return to Silent Hill randomly remembering Mary's importance to the perverse Silent Hill cult that worships her father – the town's founder. So, James spends a lot of time snarling under the sweaty waves of his brown hair, a distractingly coiffed wig. In addition to Mary, Anderson also plays Mary's doppelganger-in-a-miniskirt Maria and the abused teenager Angela, and these characters also often make pained faces under bad wigs.

The hair is only a small indication of a larger issue, one that Gans has had for 20 years – he cannot ever be subtle. Return to Silent Hill's nonsensical story strips its 2001 source material of all moral and emotional complexity, leaving only elementary shock value from its original story of a widower tortured by guilt. You should prepare to see a rape victim presented as a CGI spiderwoman with bare, necrotic breasts for eyes – and that widower painting a self-portrait like he's learned something from it.

Several times while watching Return to Silent Hill, I wonder to myself, why am I not scared? It's over-the-top, but I should still be frightened to witness James relinquish his grip on reality, to watch the abandoned Silent Hill turn dark like a cavity around him. But the movie's obnoxious plot and strobe-light editing make James' psychological breakdown just seem… funny. It doesn't help that both James and iconic series villain Pyramid Head – who, in Silent Hill 2, trudges around with the undeniable sex and scary power of a Roman executioner – keep yelping at each other like goats.

Mary, who's an especially imposing ghost in developer Bloober's incredible 2024 Silent Hill 2 remake, is simply a body in Return to Silent Hill. She, Maria, Angela, and the lonely, untrusting child Laura (Evie Templeton, who reprises her role from the video game remake) are all meant to represent the same woman. In making this narrative decision, Return to Silent Hill tells me its most important female characters – despite the unique physical, emotional, and sexual tortures they have all endured – are interchangeable. If they're interchangeable, then they're forgettable – and if the movie doesn't care about its characters as individuals, how can I?

Only a game

No, I can't care about Return to Silent Hill – not when it insults my loyalty to both Silent Hill 2 and horror movies by neither being an impressive adaptation nor coherent enough to act as a standalone film. It's hard to parse what's unfolding in the movie without the history of the game. But Return to Silent Hill's random references to moments from the game also fit awkwardly inside it. James, for example, looks self-conscious each time he touches a steel pipe.

There are some gothic details I keep lingering on that may have potential to, in a few year's time, elevate Return to Silent Hill to cult hit status like 2006's Silent Hill. I appreciate its terribly beautiful weather, for example – it's always snowing human ashes – and Mary briefly transforms into a gray moth goddess, bald and timeless like a gargoyle. But the charms of Return to Silent Hill are lost in its excess. It's like salting soup with blood.

Return to Silent Hill releases in theaters on January 23. For more, check out our guide to the other most exciting upcoming horror movies, or our list of the 10 best video game movies ever.