Return to Silent Hill
Cineverse
In 2006, Christophe Gans released an adaptation of KONAMI’s 1999 survival horror game Silent Hill. It was released to some fanfare and middling reviews, which praised its atmosphere and effects, but essentially lambasted every single other aspect of the film. It made a bit of money and eventually warranted a sequel with a new creative team, which is considered to be worse in every single way. Since the sequel, the franchise has been seen as dead, until now.
Return to Silent Hill was stuck in the trenches of development hell for a couple of odd years before being finished and distributed by Cineverse, the same distribution team behind Terrifier 3. Christophe Gans is back in the director’s chair, and this time he's adapting Silent Hill 2. Unfortunately, for those who are fans of that game, this is not going to go well for you. Return to Silent Hill goes for a whole lot of different things but is unable to land just about any of them.
While the script’s dialogue could be considered by some to be juvenile, and they'd be correct in that assessment, there's a small bit of charm that comes with this half-stilted, wooden writing that comes to life in low-budget, low-stakes, horror. That charm can carry things forward for bits and moments, but regrettably, the only thing worse than the dialogue is the casting. There is not a single worthwhile performance in this entire film, and to make matters worse, the costuming department has essentially thrown fan-made caricatures of characters from the game on screen and hoped no one would notice. It is very noticeable.
Carrying a rumored production budget of 23 million dollars, the real question is where exactly did that money go? There's very little here that screams costing more than the price of a decent latte, and that continues to be apparent whenever the Microsoft paint level CGI creatures sprawl across the screen. While Gans is able to carry some of that atmospheric tension from his original film over to this one, it's arguable that the town being covered in fog and the usage of Akira Yamaoka’s haunting score do a majority of the heavy lifting there. The town of Silent Hill is scary no matter what, but that's no excuse to pump out slop.
Return to Silent Hill is disappointing in too many ways to name, but it's also hard not to acknowledge that it's fairly fun as a low-budget fun horror movie, but that's never what this should've been. It's incredibly incoherent, poorly made, and has very little in the way of true scares. The final act couldn't make less sense even if Gans tried, but the one saving grace is this: it's so much better than Silent Hill: Revelation.