Should you rewatch “Silent Hill,” the exceptionally good live-action 2006 video game adaptation, before checking out “Return to Silent Hill,” a narratively unrelated sequel based on the popular “Silent Hill 2” game? Yes and no, though for the same reason: the first “Silent Hill” movie, a creepy and atmospheric mood piece directed by the still largely unsung journeyman Christophe Gans (“Brotherhood of the Wolf”), holds up really well.
The 2006 “Silent Hill” gives viewers a clear sense of its source material’s appeal. We trail after Rose (Radha Mitchell), a troubled mother, as she searches for her sick adopted daughter in the titular ghost town. “Return to Silent Hill,” also directed by Gans, delivers a lot of the same moody pleasures as that earlier movie, only its story, about James (Jeremy Irvine), a disturbed painter, and his quest to find his wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), often feels simultaneously too light and familiar to match Gans’s previous tribute to Konami’s potently surreal video game series.
Both of Gans’s movies rely on nightmare logic and attendant disorientation to establish their unnerving ambience. You certainly don’t watch these movies for their dialogue, unless you have a very specific taste for emotionally flat, sometimes laughably florid exposition (this is a judgment-free space).
Rather, you’re more likely to want to see “Return to Silent Hill” for the sake of watching James explore the town’s abandoned streets and various decaying environs. After that, there’s the mystery of what happened to Mary, the daughter of the town’s beloved founder and religious leader Joshua.
Still, as fans of the video games know, most of the secondary characters mainly reflect back on James as they each provide him with a few morsels of information about Silent Hill and its doomed residents. Video game players are likely used to these background fixtures, which aren’t developed much and are often dismissed as Non-Playable Characters (NPCs). Video game players will also likely be unfazed by the movie’s early scenes, which resemble the games’ non-playable, pseudo-cinematic cut scenes, which provide a lot of wide-angle, god’s-eye views of the town in between scene changes.
James’s story doesn’t crossover with the previous “Silent Hill” movie, but it does feature a number of allusions to its predecessor and its series-defining highlights. Cockroaches with teeth, religious zealots with a purity fetish, and a brolic mute swordsman named Pyramidhead all return to give what sometimes feels like overglorified fan service to presold devotees. But while “Return to Silent Hill” does feel like a faithful and likely necessarily stripped-down approximation of “Silent Hill 2”’s charms, it ultimately pales in comparison to Gans’s previous movie.
Still, it’s hard to knock a sequel too much for landing exactly where its creators seem to have aimed for, especially when most of its shared references still have their background-Jumbotron-video-at-OzzFest-charms. Gans still does a fine job of focusing more on James’s surroundings than on him, which suggests that he understands this assignment more than most.
You don’t need to care about how James will resolve his concerns for Mary, her oversexed doppelgänger Maria (also Anderson), and his mysterious connection to Pyramidhead. “Return to Silent Hill” still mostly succeeds at encouraging viewers to slow down and gawk with James at various putrid creatures and their labyrinthine haunts.
Then again, you might catch a bad case of deja vu if you’ve seen the 2006 “Silent Hill” movie and remember what became of Rose and her encounters with Pyramidhead, the cockroaches, and a different batch of religious zealots. There’s even an eerily similar scare scene in “Return to Silent Hill” featuring another hospital corridor full of faceless, mobility-and-sight-challenged ghost nurses wielding unnecessarily keen scalpels. Would it be a “Silent Hill” movie without them? Probably not. Do these points of contact still feel like an unnecessary nudge in the ribs for fans and maybe a vain attempt at playing the hits for the uninitiated? Yeah, unfortunately.
The worst thing you can say about “Return to Silent Hill” is that it’s not as fresh or compelling as its predecessor, a pitfall that will likely not surprise anybody who has hoped or even waited twenty years for Gans to make another video game movie. Still, you might want to watch Gans’s first “Silent Hill” even if you have no plans to see his follow-up, mostly because it’s a rare video game movie that has no problem treating its characters and their personalities as the secondary draws that they clearly always were. Gans’ sequel delivers more of the same, so it likely won’t impress anyone who doesn’t already enjoy getting lost in the fog.
