Return to Silent Hill is a return to the film franchise, an adaptation of the video game series of the same name, Silent Hill.
Return to Silent Hill is the third movie in the franchise and tries to bring the beloved entry in the video game franchise, Silent Hill 2, to life.
The keyword is tries.
Now I am not one to trash on a movie fully, so let's talk about the good parts of this film.
This is a visually stunning film; the visual effects are amazing, especially when transitioning from the real world to the overworld.
The cinematography is even better than the first two films, with some beautiful shots, though during our first time being in the overworld, you could definitely tell James Sunderland didn’t belong there.
The actual Silent Hill town looks great as well, and the fog looked almost natural in a way, and the monsters looked even better.
I liked that they chose to use practical effects for the monsters and chose professional dancers to play the monsters.
Professional dancers are used to moving their bodies in unnatural ways and are used to doing formations during stage performances, so it was really nice to see them utilized that way.
What impressed me the most was the acting.
Going into this film, I was hoping the main cast would have good performances, but with what was given to them, they did better than I expected.
Now speaking of the script, let’s get into what I didn’t like
SPOILER WARNING.
The script is almost awful, and I mean almost because up until the second act, the movie pretty much follows the same beats in the game.
That is, until we meet Laura.
I’d say everything after Laura just makes zero sense.
There’s a single point in the movie where we go from Silent Hill to the real world to the over world and back to Silent Hill.
Which is confusing because it all happens in one room, and we never establish which part we saw was real; it just happens.
Another part of the script that I genuinely hated was the “plot twist” of who Pyramid Head was, because they literally reveal it in the second act of the film.
Which in turn makes the “twist” absolutely pointless.
Another pointless twist was how Mary got sick.
They just recreate Alessia's story from the first Silent Hill, of her being a child of a cult and being worshiped as a healer of some sort, which is only in the film for a good 10 minutes and is never fully explained.
Speaking of Mary, she isn’t just Mary, James ' girlfriend, no, she’s Mary Angela Laura Crane, combining Mary, Angela and Laura and making them the same person.
A lot of this film suffers from just the confusing script that wants to mould too many different storylines into one while trying to make it feel similar to Silent Hill 2.
It became really hard to follow where the film was going and what setting we were in.
I even found myself questioning everything that was going on in the third act, and I almost fell asleep during it.
Mind you, this was a horror film, and audiences were supposed to be scared or engaged; I just found myself more confused and bored than scared.
Not to mention the even more confusing ending they gave.
It felt like they were unsure whether to make the ending sad or happy, so they put both endings and hoped it made sense (it didn’t).
I went into this film wanting to like it, because if it was a bad movie, I thought maybe it would just be a good Video Game Adaptation in return, but the fact that it was bad on both ends just sucks.
Overall, if you’re a fan of psychological horror, a fan of video game adaptations or both, I recommend you not watch this film because it is a disservice to both genres and you’d put your money to waste.