Sharon suffers from a mysterious disease that is slowly consuming her; doctors don't know what to do and the only remedy seems to be taking her to Silent Hill, a town in West Virginia that Sharon inexplicably keeps pronouncing during her frequent sleepwalking episodes. Rose, Sharon's mother, decides to go to the unknown town against the will of Christopher, her husband; but upon entering Silent Hill, the car carrying Rose and Sharon has an accident and the woman loses consciousness: upon waking up, Sharon is gone and Rose finds herself wandering alone in a completely deserted town shrouded in perpetual fog. But there is something living in the streets of Silent Hill, in its dilapidated buildings and dark alleys, something that might have kidnapped Sharon and is linked to the ominous past of the town.
In 1999, the famous video game distribution company Konami released "Silent Hill," a survival horror that winks at its famous predecessor "Resident Evil," but manages to create a more dreamlike and unsettling universe than any other game created up to that point. The success was great, and within four years, three more titles followed, all of high artistic and emotional quality, capable of catapulting the video game player into a unique terrifying experience for this genre of video games.
The dream factory, universally known as Hollywood, had long since sensed the possibility of making a feature film from this series of video games, also thanks to the excellent public and critical success that the film "Resident Evil" had achieved. But this project remained in the works for a long time, and while on the big screen followed films based on famous video games, almost all of poor quality, work was being done on the screenplay and cast (artistic and technical) to bring "Silent Hill" to celluloid; until today, 2006, the fateful year in which the world of video games and the world of cinema finally met and merged in the most functional and successful way possible.
It's difficult to talk about "Silent Hill" in writing and manage to evoke effectively the rich sequence of emotions it is capable of arousing in the spectator ex video game player; a spectator who abandons the joypad to sink into the armchair, in the darkness of the room to relive here, on the big screen, the unsettling atmospheres and the panic terror that hours and hours of play had managed to instill in him. One can therefore calmly affirm that "Silent Hill," up to today, is the best and most faithful cinematic adaptation of a video game: the city's geography, the meticulous care with which the places (the school and the hospital above all) have been reproduced, the sense of hallucinatory dispersion and dilation of time and space, the fog, the monstrous creatures... in short, everything that "Silent Hill" was in pixels is now also on film!
But "Silent Hill" is not just an excellent adaptation of a video game, it is not just a diligent work capable only of provoking orgasms in hardcore video game fans of the video game: "Silent Hill" is also a splendid expressionist portrait, a nearly perfect film, capable of instilling unease and wonder in the spectator, disgusting him for the macabre solutions and leaving him open-mouthed for the exceptional visual solutions adopted. In this film, everything works perfectly: from the macabre atmosphere of estrangement to the construction of the story and characters, from the splendid sets to the spot-on soundtrack (which includes the original music from the first three chapters of the video game series). There are numerous scenes that literally make the hair on your arms stand up, this time not exploiting the sudden alternation of sound planes and sudden appearances of visual flashes, but using scenes that manage to create a real sense of danger and unease in the spectator (among the memorable scenes certainly the first descent into the darkness of Rose, in the alleys of the town and the confrontation in the school bathrooms); moreover, numerous sequences of impressive visual violence and some forays into splatter (see the spectacular finale) must be added.
The story told in the film may, for those unfamiliar with the video game chapters, seem at times difficult, due to the complexity and the rich array of symbolism that the video games already presented, but if attention is paid, it will be easy to get to the bottom of the entire affair. Praise also goes to the suggestive sets of Carol Spier, which, as mentioned, manage to reconstruct in a meticulous way the locations of the video game and have the ability to instill terror in the spectator thanks also to the exceptional desaturated and anti-naturalistic photography of Dan Laustsen. To all this, we add a meticulously elegant direction by the French Christopher Gans (a great fan of the video game who literally begged the top of Konami to lead the film) and a cast of excellent actors including Radha Mitchell ("Pitch Black" and "Man on Fire"), perfect in the role of Rose thanks to great skill and the physique du role, Sean Bean ("The Lord of the Rings" and "The Dark") in the role of the husband Christopher (in reality a character added later, not foreseen in the first draft of the script) and an unsettling Modelle Ferland in the role of the little Sharon.
"Silent Hill" is therefore a great film, one of those we rarely come across in the span of many years; a film that will surely be appreciated by those familiar with the video game but will certainly not leave others indifferent either. The best work based on a video game and one of the most emotionally gripping, terrifying, and stylistically flawless examples of horror cinema of the last 20 years. It will surely set a precedent.
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