Return To Silent Hill adapts the most popular and seminal game in the series, Silent Hill 2. That game is among the favorites of fans out there, and I’ve never played it. So going into Return To Silent Hill was a bit of an experience. After watching the film and reading the synopsis of the game, it’s a direct adaptation. This story follows James Sunderland (played by Jeremy Irvine) and the slow descent into madness caused by his relationship with Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson). They meet each other on a whim outside the mountains of Silent Hill. Their relationship blossoms and for a while, is the picture-perfect courtship. Then, James learns about the seedy underbelly of Mary and her family and the town.

Eventually, James leaves, and Mary gets sick and passes away, and that’s where we’re brought in for Return To Silent Hill. He gets a letter from Mary asking him to come back, but the town is much different, a fog has set over, a deep, thick, and quite frankly, ugly fog.

Director Christophe Gans returns after his decent version of Silent Hill from 2006. This movie doesn’t look like the effects changed much, nor did the somewhat nonsensical aspects. Writers Gans, William Josef Schneider, and Sandra Vo-Anh had their work cut out for them adapting the game for the big screen. This is at the heart of it, an exploration of the grief that James goes through because of cutting off Mary and his relationship. That’s easy to see, it’s a nice thing to follow.

However, it doesn’t manifest itself very well, and that doubles for material here that even good performances from Hannah Emily Anderson (in a triple role) and others can overcome.

Right from the get-go, there’s just a feeling that the movie is going through the motions. It doesn’t add anything to the plot of the game, it’s just a completely direct adaptation. The remake of Silent Hill 2‘s effects look better than what we’re given on screen here. There are several shots that aren’t trying to hide that people are standing in front of green screens. The creatures look creepy, but they stick out like a sore thumb against the backgrounds. There’s one particular shot of plague rats running that stuck out in my mind as looking incredibly hokey.

The most impressive performance is Evie Templeton as Laura, who also plays her in the game, but she’s really not around long enough to make much outside of a brief impression. The biggest problem with a direct adaptation is that cutting a huge game story down to 100 minutes means there’s lot that comes and goes without fanfare. The character Eddie is a complete jerk to James at the beginning, and there’s no payoff for him. They’re all there to move the plot along and the side characters don’t stick out very much.

Since I watched this movie, I tried out the remake of the game, and it’s terrifying. This movie, however, loads up all the scares in the front portion of the movie, and the second half feels bare in that aspect.

Return To Silent Hill ends up as a direct adaptation of one of the best horror games of all time, but it doesn’t differentiate itself enough from the source material, to feel like it was anything other than the Cliff’s Notes version of the game.

The effects are ugly, the script breezes over things and introduces characters that have no bearing on the actual outcome of the plot. Even with that, it’s still cool to see Pyramid Head and the nurse mannequins on the big screen. For fans of the game, there might be more mileage, but as a movie, Return To Silent Hill doesn’t hit.

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