Silent Hill (Widescreen)

The first - but hopefully not the last - movie based on the groundbreaking series of video games, "Silent Hill" is an utterly riveting, horrific, eerie, and pyschologically and conceptually deep film, one that may take multiple watches to really 'get' all the facets within it, particularly if one isn't familiar with the games.An adopted little girl named Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) is plagued by violent night terrors and sleepwalking in which she seems to be frantically searching for something. She's unaided by conventional medicine, and after one night's nightmare-driven excursions nearly prove fatal, the girl's mother Rose (Radha Mitchell from "Pitch Black" and "Man On Fire") decides to seek out what her daughter screams for in her sleep - 'Silent Hill!!' - and upon discovering that Silent Hill is the name of an old town, heads off with Sharon in search or relief for her daughter, in what form she doesn't even know. Her husband (Sean Bean, of the criminally under-noticed "The Dark" as well as "Lord Of The Rings", "Equilibrium" and "Flightplan") fears this is just going to do more harm than good and takes off after them.Upon arriving in the abandoned town, Rose becomes separated from Sharon and with the help of a policewoman attempts to find her, and the true terror begins. Silent Hill is a town like no other, of which multiple versions exist concurrently, and which sometimes shifts between them. It's a place of nightmares and monsters - brought to life with amazingly disturbing imagery and visuals - and the ancestral home of a Very twisted, corrupted version of religion. And many of its old secrets focus right on the little girl.To touch briefly on the psychological and conceptual depth of the movie, I'm going to have to give away more than I normally do, so I'll preface the rest of this with*WARNING: SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD**Okay, there's a lot here open to interpretation, so the way I see some of the things toward the end of the film isn't neceasrily how everybody else is going to see it (and a lot of it is just hinted at, hopefully for possible expansion should they do a sequel), but there seem to be an awful lot of strange and fascinating undercurrents here. Basically - it never states this outright, but this is my take - there are places on Earth where if enough human cruelty and hatred comes out, it can open the door for those things to draw 'entities' or states-of-existance to come into contact with our world. But this is a really interesting part - the demon Pyramid Head, from a certain point of view, seems to have come to empathize with the innocent more than with the cruel, and to be acting as an avenger of certain victims in the town's history. That's not to say Pyramid Head is a 'good guy' rather than the 'bad guy' of the game, but it raises questions. Can a demon come to feel compassion?, for example. This goes with the whole flow of the video games, which has brought in questions of basically 'what horrors can twist the good into the abominable?', and has also played with the flip side of the equation.If there is a sequel, I don't know whether this angle will be followed up on, or whether it'll be left stand as an 'even the most evil can have some occasional virtue in there' thing without taking Pyramid Head from his 'terrifying villain' role, but either way has its merits. "Silent Hill" is chock-full of revenge, evil characters, blood-ripping/bone-crushing horror, and the most ghastly visual imagery, and it's also loaded up under the surface with themes of love, compassion, and justice. There's a strong interplay between characters, as with the games - you're never playing just a character out to save their own skin in the video games, there's always something of a group dynamic where there's someone your character is out to protect, and simultaneously where your character needs to take a chance on trusting other, possibly duplicitous, characters as well.It all combines brilliantly, and in this case gives us one of the best movies of the year. A true great.

I'm very picky about my horror. While I do love the genre, the vast majority of horror movies do not appeal to me because they simply fail to push any of my psychological buttons. For example, I don't even consider Walking Dead horror. I can't even say that the horror movies I do enjoy scare me, but the ones I really like appeal directly to my sense of morbid curiosity, contain shocking visuals, at least a passable plot and acting, and a good soundtrack.The soundtrack was great background music when it needed to be, and brought nicely to the forefront to enhance the important scenes of the movie. One could conceivably call the organ music during the finale cheesy, but it worked for me. I don't think many movies could have pulled that off, but Silent Hill's finale was so fantastically over the top that fit perfectly in mood, and in theme (the monster, created). At one point in the movie there was a catch electronic bass track that was well timed, and really drove the tension as in the intro to Resident Evil.I found the acting performances very enjoyable! Yes, there were a few minor scenes with stiff acting, and and stilted dialog ("In the eyes of a child, the mother is God"), but not enough to take away a star. Overall I felt like the cast did a fantastic job, and provided some of the best horror movie acting I've seen in a long time. Of course Sean Bean was excellent, but Radha Mitchell (Rose), Laurie Holden (Cybil), Kim Coates (Gucci), and Alice Krige (Christabella) all kept me interested and carried the story forward with very satisfying performances. In particular, I think it would have been really easy to flub up Radha Mitchell and Alice Krige's roles, but they both played their parts almost perfectly.Visually, Silent Hill is what I want in a horror movie. Unsettling, dark, gritty, and over the top (in a good way). Pyramid Head was absolutely superb, and the first scene where he is encountered REALLY set the mood. The second of his scenes on the stairs of the church was equally well done. The human cockroaches were very creepy, and the town itself really gave me the sense of a town burned to the ground in some evil act, and hiding an evil secret. The finale is one of the best horror scenes I've ever watched.I like horror movies with some type of investigative tension, and Sean Bean's search for his wife fit the bill. Sean Bean's is more of a supporting role, and he managed to both keep the search for Alessa's past interesting without getting in the way of the main story. I think my one complaint is that I would have rather seen Sean Bean discover what happened to Alessa rather than having it delivered to Rose as narration. Then maybe he somehow gets a phone call through to her, and explains it over the phone with static crackling in the background. They way they did it was still pretty good though, and I'm not taking a star off.Overall I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes such horror classics as John Carpenter's The Thing, Hellraiser, The Brood, and The Omen.