Silent Hill

There's trouble brewing in the sleepy town of Silent Hill, West Virginia. The place seems to be more or less deserted, with only strange, ragged women with probing eyes (think Kate Bush 1982) to keep you company - along with the monsters, of course. Hideous misshapen mannequins slither and slide along the uneven, rubbish-strewn ground, twisting in and out of buildings that are decayed and crumbling; and it seems to be raining ash. If you think that's bad enough, you should see what happens when it gets dark.

If you've played any of the four-game series that’s adorned consoles and PCs since 1998, this may all sound familiar - as indeed it should. For a game-to-film adaptation Silent Hill is surprisingly faithful to its source material, with Carol Spier's production design expertly recreating the bleak open spaces and claustrophobic, junk-filled interiors of the original. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen picks a versatile array of close-ups and elegantly-placed wide shots, and swoops the camera over and under with alarming regularity, constantly giving you the impression that someone else is watching the characters besides you. It's an eerie feeling, albeit one that you don't really think about until you're on your way home.

The story itself follows the plot of the first Silent Hill (although the film as a whole borrows elements from at least three of the games), with a few adjustments in personnel. Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell - Phone Booth / Pitch Black / erm, Neighbours) has come to West Virginia after her troubled pre-teenage daughter starts crying out the town's name in her sleep. Before she knows it, the car's broken down and daughter Sharon has gone missing - leaving Rose with no alternative but to decide not to call the authorities but rather hot-foot it into the town, leaving her jeep abandoned in the middle of the road with both the doors open. It's the first of several moments that make you go "Whaaaaaa…?", and you quickly realise that while you can get away with this sort of thing on a Playstation, pulling it off on screen with any sense of credibility is another matter entirely.

Rose is accompanied on her journey through the ghost town by cop Cybil - there's never any question of romance but the lesbian undertones are apparent, if subtle - and a host of other characters, many of whom will be familiar for the previously initiated. Most of them don't have much to do except look sinister or frightened, although Alice Krige lends able support in a role which, will decently performed, will nonetheless have you scratching your head trying to remember where else you've seen something awfully like it. In the meantime, Rose's husband (Sean Bean, sporting the worst American accent since Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment) is desperately searching for his wife, which he does by driving to West Virginia and standing around looking lost. These sequences serve to flesh out the narrative and give us a little more backstory, but also slow things down quite a bit, and thankfully they're kept to a minimum.

Bean's appearance, you get the impression, is something of a token gesture in a film that's largely populated (and dominated) by women. The protagonist's gender switch from console to big screen is one thing, but the feminist bent that sweeps through the whole film is quite another: the lead may be in a skirt, but the women as a whole are the ones wearing the trousers. It's therefore a shame that Rose (initially, at least) deals with her nightmarish encounters largely by yelling "Sharrrrooonnnn!!!" at the top of her voice, as well as running away and screaming an awful lot. You could argue that her reaction is quite reasonable given what she's actually running from, but that doesn't make it any less irritating. She's redeemed somewhat come the second half of the film, when she gains a sense of momentum and starts to be a bit more sensible (and almost heroic), but the damage is already done.

Part of the appeal of Silent Hill was that it was a game where you were only half aware of what was going on. Things happened for no real reason other than they Just Did: the town's grotesque transformations were never really explained, and while the plot did unfold eventually there were still an awful lot of loose ends left untied when the credits began to roll. Transferring this ethos to the screen has mixed success - it's refreshing, on the one hand, to have a horror film that doesn't signpost all the creepy moments and tell you exactly when you ought to be scared, and the atmosphere of constant dread (as opposed to the peaks and troughs of conventional horror) has been maintained with striking success. That said, ambiguity is a double-edged sword, and the chances are that anyone unfamiliar with the game will spend much of the film's two-hour running time trying to work out what the hell is happening.

More than this, the narrative suffers from sticking a little too close to the game's plot at times. Rose and company are bounced from location to location with the aid of a series of clues - think Treasure Hunt with cockroaches and vicious midgets and you'll get the idea. This works in the context of a control pad wrestle but it's not always fun to watch, and leads to an occasionally plodding storyline - you get the impression that the plot points are there purely as a catalyst for the next (admittedly impressive) set piece, as the film shunts from location to location with all the subtlety and sense of natural progression of a Dalek reading the Shipping Forecast.

Once you're in the set pieces, however, all is forgiven. It's true that things happen for no reason and that they're not explained, but that's half the fun. Fans will be watching out for the numerous in-jokes and references (the town maps' uncanny resemblance to the in-game navigation system, the repetition of certain sequences almost shot for shot, as well as some welcome cameo appearances), while non-fans will either be appalled at the occasional excessiveness of the grotesque, blood-soaked visuals, or sucked right into the chilling nightmare of a small, anonymous town gone to hell. Whichever it is, you can't argue against the film's authenticity - from the occasionally dreadful dialogue right down to the liberal use of the original soundtrack. Silent Hill - like the town itself - is only semi-accessible, and that's not likely to win it a great many new fans, however good it might be. But it'll please the gamers, and in a world where most cinematic adaptations are genuinely dreadful, that has to count for something.

(Monday, 1st May 2006)