Silent Hill Review

Christopher Gans is a criminally underated Director. His film "Brotherhood Of The Wolf" is a modern classic; which blends action, and a bizzare story masterfully. So naturally when I heard that Gans was going to helm the film adaptation of one of the most haunting stories of the past 20 years: the video game Silent Hill.

The movie starts off with relatively standard horror fair of a young girl running away from her family in the middle of the night. As her mother finds her staring above an abyss which turns into what is your first taste of the flawless and amazing cinematography as the abyss turns into a macabre, shattered, burning industrial landscape with a girl at the bottom. So after the girl is recovered by her parents her mother takes it upon herself to take young Sherry to the place which she keeps referencing during her increasingly dangerous sleepwalks: Silent Hill.

Silent Hill in the film is a mining town which was destroyed by an apocalyptic fire years ago. The sequences in Silent Hill are nothing short of breathtaking. Imagine it as like a music video for some really dark sounding Post Rock. The city is covered in a constant rain of ash. But the real horror comes when the air raid sirens sound. When twilight descends upon the city. The creatures made of ash that attack Rose are only surpassed in strangness by the wonderfully done Pyramid Head.

One of the reasons I love this movie so much is because of the very serious undertone to the eary horror plot and superlative cinematography. The survivors of the mining fire, which was caused by the hatred that the townspeople directed towards the girl who would be reincarnated as Sherry years later. The movie is a brilliant analysis of cult behavior with a healthy dose of bloody poetic justice.

Please, even if you don't like horror. Give this one a chance.

5 stars.