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Silent Hill
May. 10th, 2006 09:28 amI said that Silent Hill deserved a review of it's own, and here it is.
Silent Hill has had varied reviews - by and large very positive, but a number of people who've played the games have said that if you haven't played them then you might have difficulty following the plot. Well, I've not played the games and I'm glad of that because I went in with no expectations and spent most of the film thinking "Holy crap! This is great! What the hell is going on?!"
It's not often that my abiding thought whilst watching a film is "I wish I'd written this".
It doesn't start very promisingly. Bland married couple Sean Bean (possessed of the worst American accent you've ever heard - "Yee har. I'm from t'America, luv. An' I'm one o' them good old boys, like. Aye.") and Radha Mitchell are possessed of a dual misfortune. Not only do they have an adopted 9-year-old daughter who sufferes nightmares and sleepwalking episodes, but they also seem to live in a house where the front door doesn't lock and is in easy walking distance from a busy highway and a hundred foot high cliff. This combination leads to sleepwalking daughter often wandering in front of traffic and dramatically standing on top of the cliff whilst somnambulating. Naturally the parents disagree on how to treat the sleepwalking. Father wants to pump the little girl full of drugs and lock her in a mental home, whilst mother wants to take her for a day trip to the town she shouts about in her sleep - Silent Hill.
Neither suggests putting a lock on her bedroom door, which would save a lot of trouble, but that's Americans for you.
This leads to mother stealing the daughter away in the middle of the night and, after a run in with a traffic cop who pursues them*, they arrive in the eerie, deserted town of Silent Hill; as they drive into town mother swerves the car to avoid a child who looks uncannily like her daughter standing in the middle of the road, crashes, and knocks herself out.
When she wakes, her daughter is gone, and she makes her way into the ash-strewn town to find her.
The town of Silent Hill, WV, is loosely based on the real town of Centralia, PA. Built upon a rich seam of coal, an accident in 1961 ignited the underground seam and led to the town being deserted. Apparently the ground is uncomfortable warm and plumes of smoke and escaping gas rise above Centralia. Estimates say that the coal under the town will burn for at least another century and the underground fires may spread over an area of 3,700 acres.
Looking at pictures of Centralia, it is plain that the set design for Silent Hill is heavily influenced by them. However, as mother walks through the town with ash falling like snow around her, a siren occasionally sounds - and that's when things really get wierd.
The deranged monsters which inhabit the town when the siren sounds are a real bravura work of the imagination; squalling children made of burning ash, acid-spitting armless torsoes, barbed wire-twisted zombies, giant flesh-eating cockroaches with tiny human faces and the famous Pyramid Head. Surprisingly, the film isn't scary (and I'm a coward, so I can say that) but it is suspensful and tense, and also, if you haven't played the game, intriguing and immersive.
Of course, it can't last. It does climax with a somewhat disappointing CGI gore-fest, which is how all horror films end these days, but even after that there's a surprisingly effective little twist at the end which I rather liked.
Good film. Recommended.
*Because the plot needs a gun in it later. It's interesting to watch a film of a game and spot the character thinking "Ooh, I'll put this in my inventory!"
Silent Hill has had varied reviews - by and large very positive, but a number of people who've played the games have said that if you haven't played them then you might have difficulty following the plot. Well, I've not played the games and I'm glad of that because I went in with no expectations and spent most of the film thinking "Holy crap! This is great! What the hell is going on?!"
It's not often that my abiding thought whilst watching a film is "I wish I'd written this".
It doesn't start very promisingly. Bland married couple Sean Bean (possessed of the worst American accent you've ever heard - "Yee har. I'm from t'America, luv. An' I'm one o' them good old boys, like. Aye.") and Radha Mitchell are possessed of a dual misfortune. Not only do they have an adopted 9-year-old daughter who sufferes nightmares and sleepwalking episodes, but they also seem to live in a house where the front door doesn't lock and is in easy walking distance from a busy highway and a hundred foot high cliff. This combination leads to sleepwalking daughter often wandering in front of traffic and dramatically standing on top of the cliff whilst somnambulating. Naturally the parents disagree on how to treat the sleepwalking. Father wants to pump the little girl full of drugs and lock her in a mental home, whilst mother wants to take her for a day trip to the town she shouts about in her sleep - Silent Hill.
Neither suggests putting a lock on her bedroom door, which would save a lot of trouble, but that's Americans for you.
This leads to mother stealing the daughter away in the middle of the night and, after a run in with a traffic cop who pursues them*, they arrive in the eerie, deserted town of Silent Hill; as they drive into town mother swerves the car to avoid a child who looks uncannily like her daughter standing in the middle of the road, crashes, and knocks herself out.
When she wakes, her daughter is gone, and she makes her way into the ash-strewn town to find her.
The town of Silent Hill, WV, is loosely based on the real town of Centralia, PA. Built upon a rich seam of coal, an accident in 1961 ignited the underground seam and led to the town being deserted. Apparently the ground is uncomfortable warm and plumes of smoke and escaping gas rise above Centralia. Estimates say that the coal under the town will burn for at least another century and the underground fires may spread over an area of 3,700 acres.
Looking at pictures of Centralia, it is plain that the set design for Silent Hill is heavily influenced by them. However, as mother walks through the town with ash falling like snow around her, a siren occasionally sounds - and that's when things really get wierd.
The deranged monsters which inhabit the town when the siren sounds are a real bravura work of the imagination; squalling children made of burning ash, acid-spitting armless torsoes, barbed wire-twisted zombies, giant flesh-eating cockroaches with tiny human faces and the famous Pyramid Head. Surprisingly, the film isn't scary (and I'm a coward, so I can say that) but it is suspensful and tense, and also, if you haven't played the game, intriguing and immersive.
Of course, it can't last. It does climax with a somewhat disappointing CGI gore-fest, which is how all horror films end these days, but even after that there's a surprisingly effective little twist at the end which I rather liked.
Good film. Recommended.
*Because the plot needs a gun in it later. It's interesting to watch a film of a game and spot the character thinking "Ooh, I'll put this in my inventory!"
