Silent Hill
Director: Christophe Gans
Grade: F

Silent Hill may be the most accurate adaptation of a video game ever. Pity I don’t mean that as a compliment. Truth be told, while collecting items, solving puzzles, studying maps and backtracking through previously explored areas prove plausible activities within the context of gameplay, they develop into largely unnecessary tasks within the realm of cinema which makes their inclusion here all the more vexing. This is the curious nature of Silent Hill the movie, which keeps reality at bay, impossibly detached from coherence of any sort.

Roland Barthes coined the phrase Blind and Dumb Criticism as a way to decry critics who feign incomprehension of a work in order to defame its author or point out its own lack of clarity. Never has the phrase been more warranted than it has with Silent Hill; a movie so mind-bogglingly impenetrable that not even the source material illuminates its structure. Trust me, I know. Here I must confess that I have played all four of the Silent Hill video games (admittedly to varying degrees, and never to completion) and I still didn’t understand the movie (though, I will say that $9.99 copy of Silent Hill 4 at Best Buy is looking mighty appealing at this point).

The major problem arises from the adaptation itself. See, a game player is far more willing to accept narrative inconsistencies provided that it doesn’t hinder the actual game play, which shares the task of narration almost equally. By contrast, all those oddball characters, all those archaic conversations (“The elders of my elders?” Oh, you mean your grandparents) all those goofy satanic cults and witch burnings and grotesquely absurd imagery will undoubtedly be amplified on the big screen, which means no matter how reasonably the video game may pan out it’s bound to be confusing on film.

Without the active participation to neutralize the gaudy story, all one’s left with is a film about a town inhabited by Christian fundamentalists who burn little girls suspected of witchcraft (in the 20th century, mind you!), which ends up getting out of hand, engulfing the entire town in flames, thus creating an alternate dimension filled with sadistic monsters who rip flesh off humans as they wander through an expressionist nightmare of buildings composed of equal parts organic and metallic material. Make sense to you? Well, maybe you have to witness it for yourself, though I’d advise against it by any means.

After this one, I’m now reconsidering every other movie I’ve seen this year including American Dreamz, which I gave a well-deserving F on Stylus this week. By comparison that film is fucking Network. Then again, nothing could save Silent Hill, not even the artistry of its sets; however, one element might have at least provided it with just enough kitsch to endow it with a certain kind of value. Don’t ask me how I found this, but after watching this I’m sure you’ll agree.