“Silent Hill” is the latest horror movie to use occult mumbo jumbo as an avenue to gory terror. About 30 minutes too long, very much in love with its own excessive style, it still manages to be kinda creepy, at least when it stops taking its metaphysics too seriously.
What you have here is your basic ghost town/witch hunting/lost child/mine fire story, layered with fog and glaring, bleached-out light and populated by slimy, shimmying creatures and a trail of grotesquely crucified corpses. Silent Hill is where Rose (Radha Mitchell) has the misfortune of losing her young daughter, who has been crying out the town’s name in frenzied sleepwalking episodes.
Wondering what the heck a silent hill is, Rose does the modern thing. She Googles the name, gets directions, puts the kid in her Jeep, and drives on over, much to the objection of her hubby, (Sean Bean).
To say “Silent Hill” has trouble with narrative logic implies it has a narrative. A good chunk of the film is taken up by Rose wandering the mostly deserted town and stumbling into a dark school, a dark hotel and, climactically, a dark church, where nasty doings are going down.
Accompanied by an ominous industrial soundtrack and a tough-but-cute motorcycle cop (Laurie Holden), Rose is a determined mother who keeps running into swarms of cockroach- like critters and a hulking figure with a large pyramid-shaped blade for a head. She doesn’t know what’s going on, and neither will you. After a while, you might not care.
At its best, “Silent Hill” conjures a Bosch-like world of surreal, apocalyptic nightmares that’s at least fun to look at. The movie is based on a horror video-game series. Indeed, much of the film’s action unfolds like a game, with Rose passing through one level and moving to the next challenge.
This is one of those movies with a five-minute chunk of exposition near the end that lays out the basics of what’s been going on for the previous 90 minutes. But at least this chunk has the trappings of art: It’s filled with grainy images that resemble some home-movie footage from a ’60s commune cult.
You wouldn’t think “Silent Hill” was written by a former Oscar winner, but the screenplay springs from Roger Avary, Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” co-scribe.
He won’t win any awards for this one, but he probably won’t have to hide his head in shame. As a horror movie hitting theaters during a notoriously slow spot on the calendar, “Silent Hill” just might hit.
