Return To Silent Hill (2026)
Return To Silent Hill: At Least We’re Used To Disappointment | 1.5/5
Written by Noah Dietz: 1/24/2025
It brings me no joy to report that Christophe Gans’ new Silent Hill movie is neither good as a film, nor an adaptation of Silent Hill 2.
I’d been tentatively excited for this ever since I had heard it announced. Silent Hill might not be a perfect film, but it has a lot of atmosphere that I really enjoyed. The building blocks were there, even if we had a lot of moments that really didn’t jive with the games fully. I was also willing to turn a blind eye to some issues, as it was a movie made in 2006. Lots of movies from that era have gotten hit with rose-colored glasses, so I allowed myself to do the same to a point. The 2012 film Silent Hill: Revelation 3D isn't great either, but I was also willing to handwave moments of that away too. After all, there’s room in my heart for camp. Cut to late last year when a friend sent me the trailer for this film, and I was … conflicted. I thought the CG looked questionable, but I also tried to remind myself that it was just an early trailer. It was possible that it was going to get better, but it was an ill omen for things to come. My concerns weren’t lessened once early reviews started to roll in, but I had already bought my tickets and I’ll be damned if I was going to miss getting to see a story I loved in the theater, even if it wasn’t great.
Then I got to the theater and Return To Silent Hill opened with the Scream Box logo. That was the final nail in the coffin letting me know I wasn’t going to be happy with the outcome.
There are a lot of reasons for somebody to hate this movie, but visual quality will certainly be near the top. Confusingly bad cinematography and cheap shots lead into sequences that are more stolen, beat for beat, from the game than they are homages. Quickly these scenes give way to heavy changes to the core story of Silent Hill 2, which Christophe Gans had been excited to announce he was adapting. I’m not at all opposed to the story changing up from what it had been, but I don’t feel many of the changes made here are actually done in service of the original story. Rather, the changes made are done to fit the story elements from Silent Hill 2 into the world Gans created back in 2006. Characters are melded together for the sake of a new mythos, undercutting moments that could have been more impactful without this level of changeup. More importantly, there is a borderline sinister lack of understanding to James Sunderland’s established character. I am by no means saying we can’t enjoy a redeemable character, but when dealing with established characters that your target fanbase has exhaustively analyzed, I feel this was a wild misstep.
The film feels incredibly cheap as well. With the visual identity of a high budget CW show and such highlights as the worst fake beard I’ve seen in a widely released film, there are very few moments that manage to actually invoke anything worthwhile. Scenes that are homages to the games feel tacked on and unearned, character reveals lead to confusion when we see how they’re utilized (or not), and the addition of a cult storyline that follows the lore presented in the 2006 film is something that could possibly work, but simply doesn’t. Too many changes made to the expected narrative leave me wishing they just hadn’t said it was an adaptation of Silent Hill 2. If that expectation hadn’t been set for me going in I could have at least been disappointed halfway through rather than from the jump.
While talking to my partner afterward, they said something that rang true. While there is no debate about whether this movie is good or not, it does manage to tap into the “it’s actually insane how bad this is” energy of a slew of early ’00s films. There is certainly a world where somebody holds this film in their heart the same way I hold Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. There’s a world where this gets a revival in 5 years and people claim “It actually wasn’t that bad” in the same way people have already done with a film that was a waste of my life to watch, Hell House LLC: Lineage. Return To Silent Hill manages to make so many baffling choices that you can’t help but respect the sheer audacity of taking the most beloved game of the entire series and chopping it to pieces. Silent Hill fans are certainly used to disappointment, but it doesn’t make it sting any less in the moment.