You forgave me, but I could never forgive myself.
Main Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson
Director: Christophe Gans
So close and yet not even almost close. I wanted so badly to love this one. Hell, I didn’t even LIKE it. I’m a huge fan of the 2006 original, seen it many times. I saw the 2012 sequel, SILENT HILL: Revelation several years after it came out, once, but my son and his then-girlfriend showed up in the middle of it and I got distracted and never went back to it. I want so badly to watch 2025’s RETURN TO SILENT HILL again just to see if I can piece together whatever it was I obviously missed the first time through because if this thing makes any sense whatsoever, I didn’t see it.
The plot, as far as I can tell, involves James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) who, years ago, met and fell in love with Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson). She was trying to make her escape from the town of Silent Hill, a town where she was beheld as some sort of divine figure by a cult in town. James and Mary meet at a bus stop when he almost wrecks his car, she tells the bus driver to go on without her, and James gives her a ride back to town. Eventually he moves to town to be with her, but can’t take all the people in Mary’s ear all the time so he takes off and leaves her there. Some time later, after growing a bushy fake beard, James finds Mary in a hospital room (?) where she’s sick and dying and she asks him to end her suffering. He puts a wet towel over her mouth and part of her nose and this kills her (?). Later, after taking off the fake beard, James becomes an alcoholic and somehow winds up back in Silent Hill, where he begins to search for Mary. I’m thinking maybe he doesn’t remember he was the one who killed her, or maybe he didn’t really kill her and that’s just a false memory, or it’s an alternate timeline or something else I’m not really sure of?
When he gets back to Silent Hill he finds a town abandoned except for a little girl name Laura who appears and disappears at odd times. He finds another mysterious woman named Angela according to IMDb—I never heard her say her name nor did I hear James address her as such—who is really just the actress who plays Mary in a black wig. Then there’s Maria, who is also Anderson in a different wig who is trying to get James to forget his quest to find Mary and take her away from Silent Hill. Oh, and he also meets Eddie, a dying man who says he stayed when everyone left because now he has the town to himself. Except for Angela and Laura and Maria, I assume …
Anyway, so James is looking for Mary, but the town of Silent Hill and its mysterious history are constantly trying to keep him from finding her by tossing wild and unpredictable creatures at him. He barely escapes a few of them, is in no danger from some others, and one of them seems to be a manifestation of his own … grief, anger, other miscellaneous repressed emotions? It’s unclear.
Look, I can live with a near-incomprehensible plot, but when you throw in special effects where you can almost see the outline of the green screen and where the actor himself, a real live person who has been in other movies and TV shows, a man with a house and probably a family and parents somewhere in the world, who’s most likely got a cell phone back in his trailer if he has a trailer, a man who woke up that day and brushed his teeth and maybe had breakfast before coming to set, when this person looks like he was AI-generated in 50% of the movie, I can’t handle that. I don’t know what kind of process RETURN TO SILENT HILL went through in post-production—it sounds like a LONG one considering principle photography “occurred between April 2023 and February 2024” according to IMDB—but they’ve somehow managed to strip any hint of humanity from the actors and made them look like video game characters. Overall it just looks terrible. The effect is so weird and off-putting I had to show it to my wife and daughter later that night.
I have no idea if Jeremy Irvine even turned in a decent performance because I was constantly distracted by how fake he looked throughout most of the movie. Hannah Emily Anderson did not have this problem, which leads me to believe the actors were not AI-generated, but that Irvine just looks really weird under the eerie Silent Hill lightning. Anderson’s performance, by the way, was what it was, nothing special, but not overly bad.
The movie was written and directed by Christophe Gans who directed the 2006 original, whose only other directing credit between the two was 2014’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (not to be confused with the 2017 version starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens), and who describes “his directorial sensibilities as having evolved considerably since the 2006 original, particularly toward a more psychological and introspective approach to horror.” Have they? Because I totally understood the plot of the first movie, I had no trouble following anything that was going on there. Now, 20 years later he offers us this mess that just came out as a nonsensical jumble of scenes that may or may not have anything to do with each other.
My God I wanted to love RETURN TO SILENT HILL. I’d asked my wife if she wanted to see it and she gave me a very definite, “No, I’m good.” I should learn to listen to her more often.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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