Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

Silent Hill: Revelation: What You Remember | 2/5

Written by Noah Dietz: 2/7/2026

Clocking in at a full 30 minutes shorter than the 2006 film, Silent Hill: Revelation is everything people think they remember about the first film. I’ve defended my enjoyment of this in the past, but in the spirit of actually having a constructive conversation about Return To Silent Hill it was only fair that I hold this to the same standards I’m holding Christophe Gans’s films to.

Entering with a dream sequence with the nightmare knob cranked to eleven, it’s hard not to feel like we might have something. Revelation seemingly has one goal, and it’s to make sure we don’t have a single memory of the first film remain untouched. In what was clearly an attempt to placate fans of the games who hated the original film, we stay much closer to the story of Silent Hill 3. Unfortunately, the writing team on this film isn’t as strong as the first film. In sacrificing 30 minutes of runtime compared to the first, we’ve also lost 30 minutes that could be used to adequately share story information. Infinitely more bare bones than its counterpart, Revelation gives us next to nothing while allowing our characters to know everything that’s needed for them to succeed. As if by magic, Heather (Adelaide Clemens) stumbles through the story while inexplicably having every piece of information she could need to push through and rescue her father.

While our story beats certainly take a backseat in this film, there are some incredibly strong moments where the atmosphere shines through. Once we reach the town of Silent Hill Heather is trapped in a truly hellish place. Lit with green and yellow like a rejected Saw movie, the film takes us on a trip through a mix of the classic Silent Hill industrial ruin, warehouses, and hospitals. While the larger scale shots lack the depth of Gans’s film, many of the closer, claustrophobic shots convey everything you could want from a horror film punching above its class. Additionally the film does add the Mannequin Spider, a monster that manages to embody a great deal of the classic hallmarks of Silent Hill monster design. The only monster in the film made entirely digitally, it effectively leaves  a mark on most people’s memory of the film. Unfortunately this is mostly where I stop having good things to say.

The story of this film falls apart incredibly quickly. Between scenes that exist only to tell us “hey, remember when a version of this happened in the first film?” and ones that outright speak the plot of the film to the audience in plain English, we end up being left with an incredibly unsatisfying mush. While director MJ Bassett made claims that this was to be a “sequel first and adaptation second,” many choices were very clearly made that put this deeper in adaptation territory. A slew of choices that retcon the first film are implemented, primarily focused around better representing the game. Not that it does that well either, leaving the viewer in a strange, confusingly cheap version of the world. Entire moments will be pulled from the game, seeming to shout “remember when this happened?” with little thought to how they fit into the film’s complete narrative. Kit Harington and his awful American accent gets a character whose only purpose is to serve as an invented love interest, but his story arc mostly is a direct copy of what the detective’s original role was. This is to say nothing of the uninspired inclusion of Pyramid Head once again, trapped as little more than a carousel operator for the majority of his screen time. For a direct sequel to the first film, the moments of continuation bring more confusion than they do a true sense of connection. Many of these instances of returned characters only serve to drive a wedge into our knowledge of the previous film as well. We’ve abandoned the tragic ending of Silent Hill and instead push toward a strange hybrid adaptation of the third game and a sequel film.

I said in my review for Return To Silent Hill that Silent Hill 2 was potentially the easiest story to make a compelling adaptation of, but I think when I said that, I was needlessly forgetting how strong a story SH3 has. The only decision that made sense in hindsight is to follow with what actually is a sequel. Regrettably, the issue I keep coming around to is that this movie isn’t good. As a fan of Silent Hill 3, I find it to be fun. As a fan of Silent Hill as a world, I find it to be an enjoyable enough experience. But as a film, it’s hard to justify its existence. What the film feels the most like is “Silent Hill: Hellraiser.” It’s hard not to think of David Bruckner’s fantastic film The Night House when talking about this one. A film that started its life as a Hellraiser script and turned into a proof of concept for his eventual shot at an actual Hellraiser title. Contrast this with Silent Hill: Revelation, where we’re given Hellraiser adjacent monster design that invokes Hellraiser: Inferno (a bad thing) and nothing all too similar to the game. Too sexy, not enough fear and abstract creations. At the end of the day the combination of good moments held against confusingly cheap shots make this a movie better left on the shelf in favor of a better time elsewhere.