Movie Reviews
I’ve seen and defended movies that do not have coherent endings; movies that leave us asking more questions than giving answers. Some movies need to end that way. “Silent Hill” does end that way, but shouldn’t.
In the film, a concerned mother drives her daughter to a place called Silent Hill. You see, the girl has horrible sleepwalking spells, and each one ends in her screaming, “Silent Hill!” So naturally, the mother ignores her husband, who beckons they take the child to a doctor. No, she figures the best thing to do is to find Silent Hill, and take her daughter there. That’ll do it. Uh-huh.
From square one, I didn’t like these characters. The mother seems to have some kind of vendetta against her husband’s obviously more logical suggestion, but we don’t know why. In fact, we don’t know a thing about any one of the family members. At first glance, I was surprised and a little annoyed at how quickly the movie skipped over its characters. But when the two-hour mark was breached, I didn’t care.
Inside that two-hour frame unfolds a narrative so general and so incoherent that you might as well forget the story, and behold the visuals, which really are something to see.
Silent Hill is plagued with constant fog – I think – and it rains ash. Every few hours or so, a disquieting alarm is sounded and the town becomes something not unlike my mental picture of Hell. Darkness spreads. Tiny armless “fire babies” scatter the streets. Horrible mummy-like creatures shoot burning black liquid from unseen orifices. A giant man with a metallic pyramid over his face roams the street with a knife the size of a car and a legion of bugs so immense, they feel like they’re apart of his attire.
There are a lot of fantastic and horrible sites worth seeing here, if you can stand such bombastic scenes as the one when a group of disheveled women explain to the mother that a demon lives at the center of Silent Hill, and to retrieve her daughter, she much confront the demon. Yeah. That’s cool, I guess. But then again, it’s really stupid.
I will commend the film for Jeff Danna’s fantastic electronic score. This stands with Mark Isham’s “Crash” score in showing how moving and effective electronic scores can be when done well and married with orchestral accents.
I saw “Silent Hill” with a friend who happens to be a big fan of the video game it’s based on. He liked the film a lot, and tried to explain that in order to understand the plot, you must understand that there basically is no plot. “Silent Hill” is just meant to be very frightening. And, I’ll admit, the film manages to produce some unsettling, haunting images.
If you really like unsettling, haunting images, knock yourself out. **