Warning: Spoilers follow for Return to Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2.
Silent Hill has been having something of a renaissance lately. After many years of fans being worried that Konami’s survival horror franchise would be relegated to the dustbins of history, Silent Hill has made a welcome comeback with the much-acclaimed Silent Hill 2 remake and Silent Hill f. Given that both games have sold well, it appears that the iconic horror series is here to stay, and that trend continues with a new film based on the franchise, Return to Silent Hill.
More: Return to Silent Hill Review
Directed by Christophe Gans – who previously helmed the underrated 2006 film, Silent Hill – Return to Silent Hill is a direct adaptation of Silent Hill 2. Commonly considered the best game in the franchise, a film version of James Sunderland’s story felt like an inevitability, but it will also certainly be scrutinized by fans for how closely it sticks to the source material. For his part, Gans has affirmed his love for the original game, calling the new film “an adaptation created out of deep respect for a true masterpiece of a game, Konami’s iconic Silent Hill 2.”
But now that the fog’s cleared and the movie is out in the wild, we have to ask: Does Return to Silent Hill really understand Silent Hill 2? Let’s take a look!
I See That Town
Silent Hill 2 and its 2024 remake both tell the story of James Sunderland, a man who goes to the eponymous town because of a letter he receives from his late wife Mary, who apparently died of an unspecified illness years earlier. Uncertain if Mary is somehow still alive, James traverses the town searching for her, encountering a handful of other characters and numerous monsters along the way. In the end, James has to face the truth: He killed Mary, and has been in denial ever since. Unlike most of the other games in the series, Silent Hill 2 doesn’t involve the mythology of the Order, the town’s resident evil (hah) cult, and instead focuses squarely on the personal story of one man’s journey through his guilt and torment. It’s not only one of the best survival horror games of all time, but also one of the finest examples of a video game telling an emotionally mature narrative.
Return to Silent Hill is a faithful rendition of that same core premise. Jeremy Irvine plays James Sunderland, Hannah Emily Anderson plays Mary (and a few other characters, but we’ll get to that), and the movie does indeed feature James going to Silent Hill to look for her. Many of the game’s locations, such as the opening parking lot overlooking the woods outside Toluca Lake, Brookhaven Hospital, the Heaven’s Night strip club, and the Lakeview Hotel are present and serve similar functions in the narrative. And many of the game’s monsters, such as the Lying Figures, Bubble Head Nurses, the Abstract Daddy, and Pyramid Head himself, are all ripped right from the game. Series composer Akira Yamaoka even returned to write the film’s musical score. If you’re looking for fidelity to the sights and sounds of Silent Hill 2, Return to Silent Hill has you covered.
But there’s more to a story than visuals and music. There are also characters and themes, and this is where Return to Silent Hill makes some serious changes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with altering things when adapting to a new medium; a film probably shouldn’t include James wandering through Wood Side Apartments for an hour trying to solve puzzles. The first Silent Hill movie took many elements from Silent Hill 1, but also invented new characters out of whole cloth, like main protagonist Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell), and heavily reimagined others like Dahlia Gillespie (Deborah Kara Unger). That worked fine, because that movie was more of a sibling to the games rather than a direct translation of any particular entry in the series. Return to Silent Hill is genuinely trying to be a new version of Silent Hill 2, but not every change it makes is for the better.
There’s Something About Mary
In the original game, players encounter Maria, a doppelgänger of Mary, shortly into the adventure. She’s dressed provocatively and is flirtatious towards James, tempting him to stray from his search for Mary to be with her instead. The player is even tasked with keeping her safe during certain sections of the game. Maria is not a separate character from Mary so much as a manifestation of James’ sexual frustration after losing his wife, and how the player treats Maria affects how the ending plays out. Maria appears in Return to Silent Hill, also played by Hannah Emily Anderson; however, not only is Maria’s role in the film much smaller than you might expect if you’ve played the game, but Anderson also plays another character that Silent Hill fans will recognize, and this is where things start to fall apart.
Anderson doesn’t just play Mary and Maria, but also Angela, who in the original game is not the same character as Mary. Angela is one of a handful of supporting characters James runs into during his quest, and she has her own subplot that runs parallel to the main story. Conflating Angela with Mary doesn’t just remove the purpose that Angela served in the game, but it also leads into one of the movie’s more problematic choices, which is working the Order back in as part of the plot. In the film, Mary gets a new backstory: She is the daughter of a high-ranking member of the Order, and her unseen father groomed her to be some kind of vessel for the cult’s shady ceremonies. Mary’s terminal illness is a result of her being “poisoned” by the cult, and we meet other members who present themselves to James as Mary’s friends, but are actually using her for their nebulously villainous ends.
Making Mary a victim of her father and the Order clashes with James’ journey deriving from his guilt over killing Mary.
While flashbacks with James and Mary before her death make sense for a film adaptation, these additions subtract from the personal narrative Silent Hill 2 is supposed to represent. Making Mary a victim of her father and the Order clashes with James’ journey deriving from his guilt over killing Mary. Mary even asks him to kill her in this version so that she can be free of the suffering caused by the cult’s abuse, which basically gives James a pass on the main emotional obstacle he’s supposed to be reckoning with. In the game, James killing Mary was a selfish act; he resented Mary for keeping his life locked in stasis through her illness, and wanted to be free of her even if he loved her. In the movie, James killing Mary is something she requests, making it – if not necessarily a “heroic” act – at least a more justified one. But this also blunts James’ character, which is something that happens to the rest of the cast as well.
It Doesn’t Matter Who I Am
As discussed previously, James runs into a few other characters while searching for Mary. We’ve already mentioned Maria and Angela, but there’s also Eddie and Laura. All four characters are technically in Return to Silent Hill, but their importance has been severely downplayed. Maria is only a companion to James for the film’s second act, and is killed by Pyramid Head in the Labyrinth. Instead of coming back to life later like she does in the game, Maria is gone from the film after that, with James never really acting like he’s even interested in her at any point. Angela’s subplot about being sexually abused by her father is consolidated into Mary’s backstory of being used by the Order, although whether her father also abused her in the same way isn’t made clear, despite the brief appearance of the Abstract Daddy monster that’s supposed to symbolize it.
All four of these characters mirrored James in specific ways in the game: Maria represented James’ desire to repress the ugly aspects of Mary’s memory and the temptation to embrace an idealized version of her; Angela embodied James’ depression, self-destructive tendencies, and the part of himself that feels he deserves punishment; Eddie was James’ denial of his guilt and inability to accept that he did anything wrong to Mary; and Laura was the good part of himself that has always loved Mary, and also represents the possibility of accepting his actions and finding redemption. They were all significant parts of Silent Hill 2’s thematic throughline, and helped make James into a more layered, tragic character. None of them really serve the same purpose in the film: James doesn’t seem tempted by Maria; Angela has been erased and made into an aspect of Mary; and Eddie (Pearse Egan) and Laura (Evie Templeton) don’t get enough screen time to solidify their relationships to James’ actions.
That doesn’t mean the film is a total loss. Gans is a skilled visual craftsman, and even if the script hollows out a lot of the depth from the game’s story, the look and atmosphere of the game mostly remains intact. His choice to use dancers to play the monsters really helps sell their inhuman-looking movements, and his use of lighting to make real human actors look like video game characters for key moments to serve the surreal nature of the proceedings is a technique I’ve truly never seen before. The movie also goes out on a relatively strong note, with Gans invoking the “In Water” ending of the game, where James chooses to commit suicide by driving his car into the lake with Mary’s body inside. In the film, however, James dies only to wake up at the beginning of the movie where he meets Mary again for the first time. It’s a full-circle moment that reveals James has not truly learned the lesson the town has tried to impart. Clearly, he will be trapped in this loop until he makes new choices, accepts Mary’s death, and moves on with his life.
It may not be enough to make it a great movie, but it does show that whatever faults Return to Silent Hill has as an adaptation, it isn’t wholly removed from the spirit of its source. That said, if you want the best version of James Sunderland’s tale, you’ll still be better served by booting up the game.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles, and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
