Return to Silent Hill review

RETURN TO SILENT HILL: 

THIRD TIME IS NOT THE CHARM FOR THIS VIDEO GAME-BASED HORROR FRANCHISE! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: * ½ out of 4

CINEVERSE

Silent Hill calls Jeremy Irvine back in Return to Silent Hill

 

            The popular horror video game franchise returns to the big screen for the third time in Return to Silent Hill, the latest film based on Konami’s Silent Hill video game series following its first cinematic outing in 2006 and the 2012 sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation. I should make this clear before I get started, my experience with the Silent Hill games is paper thin with most of my knowledge coming from watching other people play it and hearing it being discussed on video game YouTube channels. 

            I got the basic gist of what they were all about and how they’re played, but it didn’t grab me as much as other games when I was growing up. Still, I checked out the 2006 Silent Hill movie sometime later despite my indifference to the franchise and thought it was fine for what it was. It’s a very mid video game movie, but I can see the admiration for the source material and the cast and crew trying to be as faithful as they could, it is one of the better video game film adaptations from that era. 

            The 2012 sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation is crap and aside from a few unintentionally hilarious moments, I’m struggling to remember it despite watching it the night before seeing this. It was also made and released when almost every big movie was in 3D and I only remember like a couple of sequences where the 3D filmmaking was actually noticeable.

            Now, we have this third film released nearly 14 years after Revelation and loosely based on the Silent Hill 2 game’s plot with the director of the first Silent Hill movie, Christophe Gans (Crying Freeman, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Beauty and the Beast (2014)) returning to direct this outing. I didn’t have any expectations going into this, but we’re kind of in this golden age for video game film adaptations thanks to the three Sonic the Hedgehog movies, the recent Mario movie and its upcoming sequel, and even movies I personally wasn’t a fan of like the Minecraft Movie and the Five Nights at Freddy’s films did find huge success at the box-office so, maybe there’s hope for the new Silent NOPE! 

            Return to Silent Hill is bad and only a slight improvement over the last film, this one at least felt more like a Silent Hill movie than Revelation. Unfortunately, it’s bogged down by baffling storytelling, stilted acting, and scares that will likely leave audiences unintentionally laughing instead of squirming in their seats. 

            The film follows artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine-War Horse, The Railway Man, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again), a broken man suffering from depression and alcoholism who receives a mysterious letter calling him back to Silent Hill in search of his lost love, Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson-Jigsaw, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Purge(TV series)). However, this once-recognizable town has since become a living nightmare as James encounters terrifying figures and a dark truth as he begins to question his own sanity. 

            The film also stars Evie Templeton (Lord of Misrule, Wednesday) reprising her role from the 2024 Silent Hill 2remake video game as Laura and Nicola Alexis (The Bill, Lucky You, EastEnders) as M (No relation to the James Bondcharacter). 

            Overall, Return to Silent Hill despite it being slightly better than Revelation is a painful reminder as to why video game-based cinema still has a negative stigma even after a fair amount of solid adaptations in recent years. It’s not Uwe Boll rock bottom bad and it does try to recapture the look and feel of the source material, but what a disastrous film outside of the production design. 

            The plot is simply absurd, was anyone asking for a Silent Hill movie about a man coming to terms with the death of his girlfriend and his struggles with alcoholism? I barely played the games so, I wouldn’t know if this is an integral part of Silent Hill 2’s storyline, but coming off of the other movies, it seems like such a jarring focus that doesn’t mesh well with the Silent Hill franchise (Ironically, getting yourself piss-ass drunk would be the best way to get through this heinous film!). 

            I’m not saying the first Silent Hill movie’s plot was anything great, but at least it felt like something out of the games, a mother takes her daughter to Silent Hill only for the daughter to mysteriously disappear after a car crash and now the mother has to traverse the nightmare town in order to get her back. I was able to follow that and be invested enough so, what the hell happened here!?! 

            Maybe it is possible to make a decent Silent Hill movie about letting go of your loved one’s death and fighting alcoholism, but I need to be invested in the characters and their dilemma and sadly that is not the case here. I did not give a fuck about James in this movie and I’m sure Jeremy Irvine has acted well in other projects, but his performance in this ranges from wooden to hammy to the point of hilarity even though I’m supposed to be emotionally torn by what’s happening in his life. 

             One huge misstep about the plot structure is that most of Jeremy Irvine’s James and Hannah Emily Anderson’s Mary’s relationship is shown through flashbacks as he’s trying to find her in Silent Hill. Show us what their romance was like before all this shit hit the fan so we can actually be captivated by something in this film, despite the first film being severely flawed, at least I gave a shit about Rose and Sharon. 

            I’ll say a couple nice things about the movie, the production design looks good and does capture the look of a Silent Hill game with all the fog, ash, and overall gloomy atmosphere and it’s neat to see the creatures fans from the games recognize brought to life on the big screen…okay, that’s it! The attempts at scares are so bad, they’re borderline comical with dreadful CGI that makes the 1999 Mummy effects look like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, what’s scary about being attacked by an obviously computer-generated spider demon or a young girl scaring holding a crying demonic baby like she’s its mother? I guess in that way I could see people enjoying moments like that in a So Bad It’s Good way, but for one of the most influential horror video game franchises of all time, it deserved much better. 

            Return to Silent Hill is a shitty video game movie, shitty January horror movie, and already a potential Worst Film of 2026 contender that’s marginally better than the last movie, but that’s like saying stepping on a turd on a sidewalk is better than submerging your foot in a puddle of diarrhea. My advice is to leave this town as fast as you can and never, ever return to it.