‘Return To Silent Hill’ Movie Review: Freaky Imagery Only Goes So Far, Again, In Horror Video-Game Sequel
Photo from Cineverse
From Jeremy Kibler
Return to Silent Hill sets up non-gamers with a double whammy: it’s not only another video-game adaptation but the third installment in a franchise. So, it’s kind of funny when a crummy sequel can really change one’s perspective on that sequel’s predecessor, which wasn’t that great to begin with. 2012’s Silent Hill: Revelation was 3D junk, making 2006’s Silent Hill look like a misunderstood horror classic. While the script was pretty negligible, that first movie was at least a visually inspired nightmare that gave you sights you hadn’t really seen before. Based specifically on the Konami game Silent Hill 2, Return to Silent Hill is a return, indeed, but not exactly one that will turn the tides.
The setup is perfectly fine, initially feeling like a romantic comedy. Speed-racing around a winding mountain road in Massachusetts with music blasting and a cigarette in his mouth (which should all spell death), James (Jeremy Irvine) hits a set of luggage sitting right in the lane of a bus stop. It belongs to Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), a pretty young woman whose plans of hitching a bus to the city (Boston?) are thwarted. James and Mary hit it off after their meet-cute, but as it turns out, this happy beginning is but a nightmare for a depressed, drunken James. A letter under his door then leads him to Silent Hill, the foggy, ash-snowing ghost town where the love of his life is apparently trapped — still alive or not. Since these games (and movies) like doppelgängers, James later runs into a blonde-bobbed femme fatale in a red bare-midriff and skirt (played by Hannah Emily Anderson, in a dual role). You know the bit: a siren signals the darkness, hordes of hellish creepy-crawlies chase the hero, and out come a number of distinctly designed monsters.
The appeal of these movies should be the next-level survival video-game structure, as our characters keep running into one perilous situation after the next. It’s halfway diverting as such, particularly when there’s an encounter with the pyramid-headed executioner who likes dragging a giant knife and an intimidating group of busty, faceless, scalpel-wielding corpse nurses who twitch and stagger like back-up dancers from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. There are also two moments of icky, grotesque imagery that would make H.P. Lovecraft and Brian Yuzna giddy with demented delight. Once those decently crafted set-pieces are over pretty quickly, it’s hard to find much else to latch onto until the end.
Christophe Gans (who directed the first and clearly best Silent Hill) returns a second time, again bringing many a freaky frame that belongs in Hell (complimentary). In the promising first thirty minutes, Gans does give you the thrill of running through an inescapable hellscape, and strains of composer Akira Yamaoka’s memorably haunting score from the games set the tone. Atmosphere and nightmarish imagery can go a long way in transporting a viewer to a new world, but that’s only half the battle. Whereas Silent Hill felt more tactile in its production design, this one still offers monster prosthetics but just as many instances of visual assault and airless CGI (a human-headed spider monster might be scarier if rendered practically).
A movie can have all of the flash in the world, but without emotional stakes, it’s hard to get fully immersed. The script, co-written by Gans, Sandra Vo-Anh, and Will Schneider, is still anything-goes nonsense, despite it trying to provide rooting interest through a doomed love story (and cult trauma) that should be more darkly poetic and substantive than it is. The Butterfly Effect, this is not. It’s not for a lack of trying by an earnest Jeremy Irvine and an emotionally committed Hannah Emily Anderson, who almost give the viewer a reason to care. The stop-and-start pacing of flashbacks with James and Mary’s happiest years doesn’t help with finding forward momentum, but at least we get a sense of something being lost.
For what is apparently one of the scariest video games ever made, Silent Hill still has yet to be adapted into one of the scariest movies ever made. Fans of the game will be in heaven, and everyone else will feel dragged somewhere much warmer and much less fun.
Rating: 2/5
Return to Silent Hill hits theaters on January 23, 2026.
