Director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) and screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, The Rules of Attraction) come together to present a screen adaptation of the highly popular horror video game, Silent Hill. For whatever reason, the Academy Award winning writer fails to sufficiently tie together narrative loose ends atop film editor Sébastien Prangère’s inability to utilize the cutting room floor adequately. What results is a visually intriguing, yet overlong, quagmire of a story which flails to the ground after unsteadily wobbling without the hope of ever bearing the weight of whatever the filmmakers were attempting to convey.
Rose de Silva (Radha Mitchell, Finding Neverland, Phone Booth, Pitch Black), in an attempt to keep from having to institutionalize her somnambulistic daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), travels to Silent Hill, a deserted mining community, the result of a fire thirty years before, and the locale which perpetually appears in the little girl’s dreams. Once there, Sharon disappears as Rose finds herself in another dimension where battles between Silent Hill’s former residents and an ominous presence referred to as “The Darkness” is taking place.
Now, I must state that the ending of the film drastically shifts the storyline’s interpretation. There is a question of an alternate reading of the events in the movie based upon whether the activities of Silent Hill are to considered strict metaphors verses being real time events (which, if the latter, harks back to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village), but, regardless, both result in negation when various aspects of the interpretations are considered.
I have read another manner in which to view the events at Silent Hill: Sharon is dying of a disease and Rose, unwilling to accept her daughter’s ensuing death, travels to the ghost town in hopes of locating a faith healer. Yet, if this is the case, I argue that Avary fails to follow through, leaving this interpretation as merely speculative at best. Nonetheless, even this fails to align itself to the exacerbated ending. Avary was aware of this and, as a result, attempted to alleviate the narrative anomaly by explicating the preceding events during the finale. However, having inarticulately resolved the story’s loose ends, he then closes the film with an excessively ambiguous conclusion which, as I cited previously, presents two possible explications of the plot, both of which resemble a plot-defining sieve that thwart his forced explanation a scene before.
As many have noted, it seems that viewers need to have played the games upon which the film is based in order to completely understand what is occurring and why (I have yet to find such a reviewer who answers these questions). This is an obvious problem if this is indeed the case because in Aesthetics 101, we learn that a work of art should be able to stand on its own two feet without deference to outside sources. For those who have played the game, which might very well be a masterpiece in its own right, they have very little leverage by which to defend the film because, if the proper medium was selected to convey the ideas behind Silent Hill on the first go around, then the faux pas lands in the laps of the filmmakers and no amount of quibbling will rectify the situation. I honestly hope the latter occurred because, otherwise, Silent Hill has yet to find its home.
So what is left? Well, the atmosphere is beautifully cast in monochrome as black, white, and grays fill the screen for the duration of the picture. Once we catch on to the rotation of the Darkness, things begin to pick up as a Lovecraftian overtone is established and two daunting figures, straight from Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell, appear before us, the Janitor and Pyramid Head (played by Roberto Campanella and Tanya Allen respectively). During the production, we are issued the idea, and somewhat interestingly, that the antagonist, that is the Darkness itself, is actually the protagonist seeking revenge, which is equivalent to jumping into an argument late in the game where the dominate side seems to be tyrannically dictating the lesser as you attempt to pull the underdog up by his bootstraps, only to find out that the latter has wronged by the former (revealed during the beginning of the tête-à-tête which you missed), thereby leaving you looking like an idiot. Also, however fleetingly, we are given the hints of a condemnation of the Bush administration as we are witness to a McCarthy Era witch hunt (thus, perhaps superficially, accounting for its comparisons to Dario Argento’s Suspiria) after we have moped around Silent Hill while ashes continually litter the air. However, in the wake of the narrative fog which parallels most of the literal haze onscreen, atop the seemingly arbitrary subplot involving Rose’s husband, Christopher (Sean Bean, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Troy, Ronin, National Treasure)–which, if omitted, would have allowed for plot resolution–most of these ideas are subsequently lost and therefore posited in vain.
Does the film work as an art piece then? Not really because the pacing is too inconsistent. Even in horror, when the director attempts to offset the audience’s equilibrium for psychological purposes, a pace must be established before it can be usurped. Gans never does this as the soundtrack creeks and moans, sounding somewhat like the German industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten. Even though the plot is arguable, the metaphysics of the Darkness is quite specific, only to be violated at the end of the picture. This continuity error is second only to Cybil (Laurie Holden, The Majestic, Fantastic Four), Rose’s aide in her attempt to locate Sharon, who is apparently a master of the bloody obvious. Considering the town is precipitating ashes and that the characters have discovered the fiery demise of the town’s populace, Cybil notes, “This room looks like it’s been burned.” Lastly, and of eyebrow-raising value, is Smitty’s, the gas station/restaurant/tattoo shop on the road leading to Silent Hill.
Unlike the Italian masterpieces of the 1970’s and ’80’s, whose directors likewise placed plot second tier to their visual palettes, Christophe Gans injudiciously implies heavy plot relevance alongside what is painted onscreen and subsequently ignores the necessity of narrative validation. Not to second guess an award-winning screenwriter but, if the report is accurate that Roger Avary’s original script contained only female characters, which the production company balked at, forcing him to insert a male lead among other players, I would suggest that, considering his resume (thus, obviously able to handle a convoluted tale without undue difficulty), Avary merely threw up his hands. This, atop the purely speculative notion that Gans, not being native to America, much like Takashi Shimizu, whose The Grudge was a failure due to his interpretation (as opposed to understanding) of American culture and its attitudes and expectations toward horror, culminated in the cinematic disaster before us. I am now beginning to understand, not the film–which is hopelessly lost, but why Sony refused to preview the film.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
