Video Game Movies Are Toast If ‘Silent Hill’ (2006) Has Aged This Well

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.

First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”

The Bait: Is Christophe Gans the Orpheus of “Silent Hill”?

In Greek mythology, Orpheus was an exceptional artist granted a miracle. His music was so powerful that the gods allowed him to lead his dead wife, Eurydice, out of the Underworld on one condition — he may never look back. He and his wife almost make it, but at the threshold between hell and earth, doubt creeps in. Orpheus turns around before he’s thrust back into the human world, forced to spend the rest of his life alone filled with profound, inescapable regret.

Yes, it’s a timeless allegory about creatives who don’t know their worth without the constant validation of an audience. That’s what brings us to 2006’s “Silent Hill,” French filmmaker Christophe Gans, and this week’s IndieWire After Dark: a better-than-you-remember throwback that suggests a grim future for film.

Gans’ original “Silent Hill” adaptation from the mid-aughts was never great, but it wasn’t the disaster its 34 percent Rotten Tomatoes score suggests either. Reimagining the 2001 game, the film follows the tortured Da Silva family as worried mom Rose (Radha Mitchell) takes her sleepwalking daughter Alessa (Jodelle Ferland) into a cursed town with a psychological pull neither can explain. Meanwhile, dad Christopher (Sean Bean) scrambles to find his family from the outside.

In 2006, gamers were cautiously receptive of Gans’ loyal, try-hard take. What’s changed since is that many gamers and cinephiles, starved by decades of misfires and a fresh tidal wave of digital A.I. slop, now recognize the inherent value of any genre film that fully commits to mood, scale, and seriousness.

That reassessment holds strong on a rewatch, particularly in light of Gans’ truly abysmal new reboot for Iconic Events and Cineverse — which yours truly reviewed with a grade of “D-” much to my own dismy. “Silent Hill” (2006) is clumsy, heavy-handed, and still genuinely unsettling in some stretches. Crucially, it also trusts the audience to sit inside the source material’s characteristic confusion and embrace the story with open hearts. That’s what makes “Return to Silent Hill” such a dispiriting self-own for Gans. Like Orpheus, his second “Silent Hill” effort can’t help but look back at tattered half glories from the past— smothering what worked at the start of the century and draining the core narrative of its menace.

The silver lining is bleak, but Gans’ earlier “Silent Hill” is nonetheless better (and cheaper!) than the baffling reboot in theaters this weekend. This movie won’t scare you, really. But there’s at least some horror in knowing what we once mocked might be a high-point for video game adaptations after all. —AF

“Silent Hill” (2006) is now streaming on AMC+.

The Bite: In My Restless Dreams… I Watch That Film

The “Silent Hill” franchise has a great setting it has never quite known what to do with. A lakeside ghost town, both modern and long abandoned, the titular Silent Hill is immediately recognizable by the omnipresent fog that floods its streets and hides the monsters crawling within. The poor souls who find themselves trapped in this cyclical, treadmill-like hell face demons personal to them, reflections of the trauma and the history they bring from the outside world.  

This playground yielded one all-time great video game entry, “Silent Hill 2,” a monster story that doubles as a character study for its seemingly vanilla but richly layered protagonist. It’s a release frequently held up as one of the benchmarks for storytelling within its medium — but the rest of them? Well, the first and third mucked up their stories with some overly contrived lore about cults and gods, and the fourth was an experiment for the formula that didn’t quite work.

The following three games attempted to reheat the premise of “Silent Hill 2” without much ingenuity, and the latest (the first after 13 years) is a spinoff that completely uproots the premise away from the U.S. and into Japan. That’s not getting into the years of purgatory the franchise was put in, or the canceled Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro-made entry that lives on through the memories of those who played its legendary playable teaser when it was commercially available. 

For years, “Silent Hill” as a franchise has been comparable to the potential man meme: fans are waiting for if and when it can recapture the greatness of the second game, but it never actually “is” great (although “Silent Hill f” does kind of slap). The 2006 “Silent Hill” film adaptation is not, by any stretch, a project that really captures the franchise’s full potential. Taking the bones of its story from the original but with enough changes and additions from the first four games (including the entire musical score and an appearance from the iconic Pyramid Head of “Silent Hill 2”) that it registers more as an original tale set in the universe, Gans’ film is, bluntly, a bit incoherent narratively. 

All the lore about cults and fog worlds is a tangled web of nonsense, the characters are wafer-thin, and the whole thing is really way too long for how little plot is in it. There’s some interesting threads about motherhood and religion here, but “Silent Hill” isn’t really the type of horror movie that provides you with particularly deep themes to chew on.  

And yet why has Gans’ film, in recent years, become the rare video game movie to have its reputation improve over time? For all its flaws, “Silent Hill” has something most video game movies don’t: it looks incredible. As a pure visual experience, the horror film is a genuine triumph, with production design that pulls you fully into the town’s horrific otherworld. The rusted hallways, the damp streets, the attics filled with debris and strange occult artifacts: it’s not a pure 1:1 of the Silent Hill found within the game, but it certainly captures the feeling of plugging in your controller and wandering around the dark, labyrinthian environments of the original.   

And the monsters are truly terrifying. A combination of (sometimes shaky but generally solid) CGI and real prosthetic makeup brought the fleshy, contorted ghouls of Silent Hill to life in this film, and they’re tactile, living beasts that can step out of the screen at any time. That they don’t necessarily have much thematic relevance to the story — what exactly do the sexy bauble-headed nurses have going on in this movie about religious abuse? — can irk hardcore fans. But if you just want to see gnarly horror kills, it’s hard to top the sight of Pyramid Head ripping apart a poor, innocent woman outside the steps of a haunted chapel.    

In brief moments, “Silent Hill” manages to transcend its status as a gorgeous but silly horror movie via directorial choices that are unexpectedly sublime. A long flashback that reveals the film’s backstory could be tedious; its framing, as a ghostly, grainy old video, is stunningly done. And the ending, where Rose and her husband find themselves in the same room but separated in completely different dimensions, is a haunting and disorienting moment, one that finds a genuinely new angle on the series’ foundations. “Silent Hill” the movie doesn’t fully crack the code to making this franchise work. But in rare moments, it reminds you why this town has haunted the dreams of so many players who have once roamed it. —WC

Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie rewatch club: