“Silent Hill” adaptation a confusing mixture of fame and film

In recent years, video games have drawn some criticism for their attempts to be “too cinematic”—essentially sacrificing game play in favor of shoehorning in complexities where they don’t belong. Still, the desire to imitate movies is an understandable one—perhaps if they move closer to motion pictures, they can finally silence concerns that video games will never be seen as an art form, that they will never achieve their own “Citizen Kane.”

When keeping this in mind, “Silent Hill,” the latest box-office winner to be adapted from a video game series, becomes a more intriguing affair than if you were to look at it as a movie in and of itself. With its quick, scattershot action, the film certainly does feel like a video game, but as it goes on you can feel it trying to transmogrify from a video game into something full and cinematic, inserting more and more opportunities for plot twists and actors’ moments.

Just as well that we should concentrate on the film’s view of itself, because the plot is a complicated, convoluted mess. Little Sharon DeSilva (Jodelle Ferland), wanders lost in a somnambulant trance. Her parents’ only clue to her problem is her chant of the words “Silent Hill.” Her mother Rose (Radha Mitchell, unforgivably stiff) decides to drive to that location with her daughter; her attempts to evade a nosy cop (Laurie Holden) cause her to crash her car just on the outskirts of the hill. Awakening from the wreck, she finds that Sharon has disappeared and light gray ash is steadily raining from the sky. There are periods of inexplicable, maddening darkness, where horrific, not-quite-human monsters come out to stalk the normies, and things really start going to hell. Meanwhile, hubby Christopher (Sean Bean, busy doin’ nothin’) searches the remnants of Silent Hill, somehow unable to find his wife and child, even when they’re apparently in the same location. Whether this has to do with time travel, an alternate dimension or something different is up to the viewer to determine, simply because the film itself never quite decides how to deal with the situation.

All of that said, however, it would be unfair to call the film derivative or sedate. It kept my pulse at a pace befitting a film like this, because it understands a cardinal rule of successfully atmospheric horror films: maintaining the impression that anything could jump out and kill you at any moment. The film is wise to use its S&M-inspired monsters sparingly, as the mere threat of their presence is enough to keep viewers on their toes. And, hey, if you dig deep enough, you might even find yourself a little subtext (that is, past the pedantic religious allegories): there’s a particularly intriguing scene set in a restroom which places the heroine of the film as the bogeyman of the moment.

Unfortunately, the film’s attempts to encompass both film and video game swing back and forth between the two in a haphazard fashion, and the whole thing eventually collapses in on itself. For example, in a scene near the end, a mysterious voice chimes in saying “Congratulations, Rose,” as the screen turns bright white, and I felt disappointed not to be able to put my initials into a high score table. But right after that particular sequence, the movie became wholly cinematic, climaxing in a self-conscious showstopper that impossibly managed to be simultaneously explicitly gory and fatally pretentious. Talk about a mood killer.

I believe that video games will eventually be lauded as a serious art form, perhaps even to the point that they will have become inextricably melded with film, something “Silent Hill” apparently tries to accomplish all on its own. But they’re not there yet, and until that point where movies and games become a singularity, I suggest that you avoid this middling fetal hybrid. These things all have to start somewhere, but lucky for you, filmgoer, you don’t have to be present for all of it.