Reviewed by Tim Wong

LET’S NOT burn Christophe Gans at the stake just yet: though wildly ambiguous (are Japanese-inspired narratives in this genre anything but?), and guilty of squandering the talents of Radha Mitchell (and Deborah Kara Unger for that matter), his rendition of Silent Hill makes for vastly superior viewing as a visual adaptation. Whereas the survival horror milieu of nerve-wringers Resident Evil and Doom was lost in translation by two incompetent, insipid filmmakers oblivious to the source material at hand, Gans grafts every wrought iron texture, squalid interior, and hellishly deformed creature from the video game’s malaise with obsessive glee. The aesthetic is spot on.

The story, a fragment of several Playstation sequels, belongs to the school of unhinged mothers and their endangered daughters: out of desperation, Rose (Mitchell) extradites adopted child Sharon to the site of her night terrors in search of answers. Things go awry the moment they set foot in Silent Hill: Sharon disappears, evil lurks; Rose spends the rest of the film shrieking. Somehow she’s been banished, along with a butch policewoman and a cult of religious witch-hunters, to this ash-shrouded purgatory that periodically opens up to the gates of hell, where air raid sirens alarm, darkness gathers, before an army of the dead come out to play. The monsters unleashed here are hideously grotesque, honoring the nightmarish design of the game’s creative team – as is the gnawing, post-industrialized soundtrack, also burned from the original Silent Hill. Less convincing is Sean Bean, who wanders extraneously in pursuit of his family throughout – he’ll never find them, given the town is itself a ghost, and the portal to its inferno a mystery left tantalizingly unresolved. Treading the same beaten, Asiatic terrain of cursed landmarks and vengeful spirits transposed to the US of A, Walter Salles’ remake of Dark Water stands as the better film in that department, though Gans’ is clearly the more terrifying – or at least nauseating, courtesy of its warped netherworld decor, a cross between the tortured furnishings of Clive Barker and HR Geiger, and the barbed-wire grunge of Seven. Torture and sadism may be the new cool, but try telling that to Gans, who’s shrewd enough to recognise that atmosphere in lieu of snuff is a rare thing these days. Soak up what’s left of it while you can.

» Christophe Gans | Canada/Japan/France/USA | 2006 | In Theatres Now