Director Christopher Gans returns to the haunted town franchise but can’t seem to figure out what to do with it. There’s an admirable loyalty, maybe even poetry, in a film-maker returning to an unpromising, barely there movie series 20 years after his first crack became a minor hit. The horror film Silent Hill, based on a video game of the same name, has garnered a cult following since its 2006 release, but it’s not exactly a genre classic or beloved franchise, with a single little-seen 2012 sequel to its name – until now.
Return to Silent Hill brings back Gans for a new story set in the same ash-strewn ghost town, this one based on the Silent Hill 2 video game. Characters in these movies tend to wander into a place that is obviously haunted or cursed, refusing to leave even after it becomes clear that they should, and only decide to escape after it’s too late. Maybe Gans can relate. Or maybe he’s the only man for the job because no one else will take it.
That could almost describe James (Jeremy Irvine), the hapless protagonist. After a chance traffic-accident meeting with Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) that unconvincingly thwarts her attempt to leave home, the two fall in love, and James moves to her oddball town. Despite the movie skipping over what makes them so instantly compatible, James is all in; someone has to be. Most of their relationship is depicted in flashback, lending some doomy romantic intrigue lacking from the first film.
Making a horror movie where the hero is more casually curious than scared is a tricky proposition. James’s stubborn forward stumble is supposed to indicate his obsessive dedication to Mary – though you’d think that someone so fixated on his ex would realise when he’s meeting a mysterious woman who looks just like her. Still, for a little while the parallel tracks of past and present give Return to Silent Hill a stronger sense of purpose and mystery than it really deserves. As it goes on, however, the movie increasingly consists of James wandering around a visually distinct landscape and encountering different weird sights.
Twenty years later, Gans still can’t figure out how to escape the open-ended confinement of gameplay, or even give it the forward momentum of a game with a mission. There’s some cinematic imagery, like a horde of gross creatures, but the flashback material does a terrible job establishing any kind of real-world baseline, making the whole enterprise feel like a ghostly hallucination. Maybe it’s precisely that dream-world ambiguity that has drawn Gans back to Silent Hill. If that’s the case, James really does feel like an avatar for his director: convinced there’s something of substance here, ignoring all the warning signs to the contrary.
