RETURN TO SILENT HILL

The cinematic adaptation of a video game is a truly thorny territory to tackle, and cinema history has continually demonstrated this with numerous failed adaptations, both in terms of quality and economics. But if today we remember with pleasure a film based on a video game, that film is Silent Hill from 2006, which Christophe Gans had adapted from the masterpiece survival-horror game by Konami. Despite there having been successful attempts to adapt a video game, even recently in the field of TV series (just think of The Last of Us and Fallout), Gans' work continues to be the perfect example of a cinematic adaptation of a video game for a simple reason: the French director had found the perfect formula for adaptation, namely not remaking the video game par par, but reinterpreting it while remaining fiercely faithful to the mood and atmosphere of the original product. This was also the reason why Silent Hill: Revelation by M.J. Bassett in 2012 failed, because it heavily strayed from the typical suggestions of the saga to seek refuge in action and the spectacular enhancement of 3D. Twenty years after the successful result of the film with Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean, Christoph Gans revisits his steps and, taking advantage of the renewed interest of the gaming public in the second beautiful chapter of the saga on consoles, of which last year the remake was released, signs Return to Silent Hill which refers precisely to the video game Silent Hill 2 from 2001. In reality, Gans' idea of getting lost again in the fog of Silent Hill predates the return on next-generation consoles of Silent Hill 2 because the author of Crying Freeman and The Pact of the Wolves had already announced in 2020 that he was writing a new Silent Hill film which then actually entered production in 2022. But the journey of Return to Silent Hill has not been straightforward due to stumbles with executive production, a long post-production, and a distribution that was slow to step forward until Cineverse of Terrifier 3 decided to believe in the project. But let's get to the point: how is Return to Silent Hill? Gans has done different, albeit similar, work compared to the first film, first of all because this time he decided to faithfully adapt Silent Hill 2, but at the same time one can sense a kind of continuity with the context built for the other film, a context that presented those small but significant changes compared to the video game. For this reason, the way Gans worked on Return to Silent Hill reflects very much what the Team Silent of Konami developed with the video games, namely creating a world suspended between reality and nightmare with precise rules and setting different stories within it. But, if we want to be nitpicky, in Silent Hill from 2006 Gans and screenwriter Roger Avary put a lot of themselves, in Return to Silent Hill Gans and co-screenwriters Sandra Vo-Anh and William Josef Schneider lean much more on the script of Silent Hill 2 encountering the obvious difficulties of adapting a story thought for a different medium and also very complex from a metaphorical and psychological point of view. But let's take a step back: what is Return to Silent Hill about? James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) has received a letter from his wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson) in which the woman tells him that she would be waiting for him in their special place. The problem is that Mary has been dead for three years now and James has not been able to overcome the trauma of the loss, despite being under analysis. So James sets off for Silent Hill, the town where he met Mary, identifying the Lake View Hotel overlooking Toluca Lake as their "special place." But when James arrives in Silent Hill, he finds an abandoned town, on which a fire has fallen that still burns underground and causes a thick veil of fog generated by the same ashes of the fire. As if that were not enough, at the sound of a siren, Silent Hill changes face and is populated by horrifying creatures that seem to have come straight out of Hell. With Return to Silent Hill the difference between video game and film becomes very subtle and Gans decides to speak mainly to gamers. Some key moments of Silent Hill 2 are reproduced with extreme faithfulness, even copying the direction to offer the viewer (and gamer) error-proof quotes. Yet, it is clear that there is an idea behind it that goes beyond the simple wink, because the film is consistent with what "invented" by Gans and Avary in the previous film without showing any direct connection to that story. In practice, it does in cinema what Silent Hill 2 did in the video game. And this is truly admirable because it tells us how much love and sincere understanding of the work there is in the text that is being adapted. The first half of Return to Silent Hill recalls in narrative mechanics that of Silent Hill from 2006, as it is devoted to creating the atmosphere, James' first encounters with the inhabitants of Silent Hill, the first impact with the dimension of the nightmare and with the monsters that populate it. The atmosphere is perfect and truly spectacular, some creatures send chills, like the "patient demons" and the iconic "nurses" (it's a shame there are no "mannequins" mentioned only through a creature that James meets in the Wood Side Apartments and that also reminds of Scarlet from Silent Hill: Homecoming). Then there are the bosses of the video game, from Hangman to Doorman up to the inevitable Pyramid Head who was introduced in 2001 within Silent Hill 2 as a distorted reflection of James' psyche. The places are also those famous from the video game, reproduced with extreme faithfulness, and the characters that populate it, from Angela to Maria, passing through Eddie and the little Laura. At the same time, Gans returns to those elements that he had treated in the 2006 film and that do not exist in the video game Silent Hill 2, such as the fire, the siren that announces the passage to the Otherworld and the sect of religious fanatics who here rewrite from scratch the story of the origins of Mary. But it must also be said that Silent Hill 2 is a narratively complex video game that draws strength from the fact that the action of the game accompanies a psychological structure that develops slowly, allows the player to immerse themselves in the mind of the protagonist and understand its facets through symbolism and false realities. By necessity, a 110-minute film cannot follow the same narrative path as the game, it does not have the time and immersive value. Therefore, in addition to the contamination with new elements, the path of simplification is followed which negatively affects above all the presence of supporting characters. Eddie (played by Pearse Egan) is there but no longer has a real function, Angela loses that dramatic legacy that characterized her backstory and becomes something else (which is better not to reveal), as does the unbearable Laura (Evie Templeton, who also dubbed and performed in motion capture Laura in the remake of Silent Hill 2), perhaps the one who comes out best along with Maria. But there is a huge problem that should not be underestimated: I am analyzing the film as a connoisseur of the video game, assuming that you who are reading know the video game, which Gans also does with Return to Silent Hill. It is not, however, something to be taken for granted! And the viewer who is not a gamer might get disoriented, perceiving the film as full of plot holes. And one could not blame them, after all, because the film demands an effort to be understood that at times goes beyond the passive approach that many viewers have. Therefore, Return to Silent Hill lacks that formal perfection that characterized the first film and made it a must for gamers but also a perfectly accessible and enjoyable product for the classic viewer. For the rest: perfect atmospheres, well-managed moments of tension, creatures with attractive designs, and incredibly suggestive music, curated by Akira Yamaoka, who had composed both the music for the first video games and that of the 2006 film.