Silent Hill

For a die-hard fan of the game, it will most likely be a captivating atmospheric spectacle full of familiar heroes (or heroines). But for a viewer experiencing the theme of a town shrouded in eternal mist for the first time, it will be confusing and I dare say quite overwhelmingly so. It requires a great deal of attention, especially considering the packed visuals, which will make you forget about everything else around you, quite effectively. The editing and sound are masterful, the director primarily builds the atmosphere on these two elements. Distant clanging of iron, various rustling and whimpering – that's what you will take with you from the cinema. The ingenious atmosphere is supported by excellent roaring music, which works here as well as, for example, in Underworld. The visual effects are incredibly good and the action scenes are gripping. Occasionally, the excessive brutality and blood may be a problem for some people, but the biggest issue will be the aforementioned story for the lay viewer, which can cause quite a mess in your head with its multiple layers. It certainly requires more than one viewing. However, the question is: Do you want to see it again? (28/06/2006)

In Silent Hill, Christophe Gans didn’t set off down a path to a regular horror movie and at the beginning it turns in the direction of a psychological drama about a mother and her adoptive daughter and only later shows us hell in the real sense. At last somebody has given up on traditional (dumb) frights and Silent Hill relies on the bizarreness of deformed people - creatures (the walking...um, acid-spitting blob, Pyramid Head and the nurses). But the main thing this movie has is ATMOSPHERE in block letters and in bold. And in addition we are given a chillingly intelligent story (especially the very end will resound in your head long after) and excellent acting performances (particularly Radha Mitchell is breathtaking). I hope that the horror genre turns more this direction in the future, because this movie had me pinned to my seat with fear and sometimes I was using just one eye to watch, ostensibly using the other to read the subtitles. And that’s what horrors are meant to be. (26/07/2006)

Visually, it's absolutely amazing and whether it's Pyramid Head, Alessa, or any other appearance, I just envy what Gans presents to the viewer with a stunning piano accompaniment. Unfortunately, as someone who didn't play the video game source, I got quite lost and ended up completely lost at the end. If I hadn't looked up a lot of things, I probably still wouldn't know if I liked Silent Hill or not. After understanding the main connections, it's a bit far-fetched, but I give it four stars considering the atmosphere. It should have continued immediately the following year in this atmosphere and not turned the suspicious town of fog into a cheap horror brand. (07/12/2006)

The cruelly long runtime unnecessarily dilutes the atmosphere of the film to the limits of the current horror standard, which could have been, with the excision of about twenty minutes of scenes (and not only the ones with Sean Bean searching), the clear king of video game adaptations. Christophe Gans provides some damn fine visuals, and particularly the ones from Silent Hill itself are delicacies that can be savored endlessly. The motion and music tracks are also very enjoyable. In contrast, he utterly fails in the dramatic construction of the story, which is stacked together with overly verbose dialogue, causing the film to degrade into B-movie waters at times. Fortunately, the falling ash, the marching undead, the alarm siren, and Radha Mitchell's performance are so evocative and suggestive and haunting that it is actually possible to forget all the negatives and state with equanimity: "Messieur Gans, le Pacte des loups, est-il pardonner." (23/08/2006)

I'm not a fan of computer games, I didn't like Resident Evil, and I couldn't even adapt in the two hours after passing the Welcome to Silent Hill sign. It’s obvious that the film has been handled by the most competent people in the field and its technical aspect in particular is great and scary, not to mention the oppressive atmosphere brought by the dead city covered with falling ashes. But nothing about this film as horror can make up for a bunch of holes in the story (which I still wouldn't have minded) or my purely personal problem, namely that I couldn't find my way to it and even dozed off slightly at one point (although it might have been because I was fresh out of a graduation party). Either way, this, which in many people's opinion is the best adaptation of a computer game, didn't impress me much and I don't see any reason to revisit it. (23/01/2013)