2006 Silent Hill

• Director: Christophe Gans
• Writers: Roger Avary
• Stars: Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates, Tanya Allen, Alice Krige, Jodelle Ferland
• Runtime: 126 minutes
• Trailer Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfMEJHPcP6g
  

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

Little Sharon has a strange ailment that makes her sleepwalk and have hallucinations, so adopted mother Sharon takes her to Silent Hill trying to find answers. She ends up having a weird and dark adventure – almost like a horror video game. Which the movie is based from. The effects and story are creepy, but we both thought at over two hours long it gets draggy and repetitive here and there.

Spoilery Synopsis

Sharon has gone missing in the middle of the night. Her mother, Rose, runs through the woods after her and arrives at a huge waterfall. She sees Sharon on a nearby cliff and tackles her. Sharon screams “Silent Hill” over and over. Christopher, the father, catches up to them and carries Sharon home. Credits roll.

Sometime later, Rose asks Sharon about Silent Hill and her sleepwalking. Sharon doesn’t remember any of it, so they’re going there for a visit– without Sharon’s father. He looks on Rose’s computer, and it’s full of information about “The Tainted Town,” the ghost town of Silent Hill. Christopher says Sharon needs to be in a hospital, under medication. Could Sharon have come from there?

Rose and Sharon stop at a gas station for directions to Silent Hill. A strange policewoman stops and talks to Sharon. They break through the fence to Silent Hill with the cop in pursuit, and that goes badly when they crash.

When Rose wakes up, ash is falling from the sky, and Sharon is gone. The sign says, “Welcome to Silent Hill.” She walks on into town, and it’s completely abandoned and hard to see through the falling ash. She sees someone running in the distance and gives chase, but cannot catch up. An air-raid siren goes off. She goes down a tunnel into a big maze of corridors. Then she runs into hundreds of little mutant-children-looking things that chase her.

Somehow, Rose makes it back outside. She runs into a woman outside who says “We’ve all lost our children.”

Christopher talks to a mechanic about Silent Hill, a town that still has a coal fire burning underneath it. He comes to the gate that Rose broke through and talks to the cops there. Rose’s vehicle has been found empty, and the cop mentions he’s also missing a deputy. They drive into town, and it looks completely different to them: abandoned, but normal.

The police officer, Bennet, catches Rose and handcuffs her. They start walking, but soon reach the “end of the world” and cannot leave town. They soon encounter an armless wobbling mutant, and Bennett ends up shooting it.

Rose continues exploring the abandoned town and seeing weird things. She encounters strange men in gas masks and hides in a school. The siren goes off again, and Rose finds the room she’s in decaying before her eyes. The gas mask men are eaten by giant cockroaches.

We see that Christopher and Officer Gucci are searching in the same physical location as where Rose actually is, but it’s in a parallel universe or something. Things get crazy, and Rose runs back into Office Bennett again, and this time, she’s more open to cooperation. The pyramid-head man has quite a knife, and he’s not afraid to use it. They drive him off for a while and get out of the building.

Chris doesn’t believe the police about what happened to Silent Hill, but the archivist refuses to help him. He breaks into the library that night and reads through the old records. He finds a photo of Sharon; maybe she did come from Silent Hill.

Rose and Bennett head toward a large hotel and suspect that Sharon might be inside. They meet Anna, another mother of a missing child. She lives with Christobella, who keeps them safe; there are others here. They enter room 111, where they find a girl who looks just like Sharon; she’s Alessa. Anna screams, “The darkness is coming,” and they all run to the church. Dahlia, a crazy woman, warns Rose not to go with the others as they’re all dead. Pyramid-head shows up and does something really bad to Anna.

Inside the church, the people point at Bennett and Rose and call them witches. The leader, Christobella, comes to them. She talks about the demon who takes children. It’s all very cult-ish.

Christopher goes to the orphanage where he adopted Sharon, and wants to know where she came from. Officer Gucci arrests Chris for disturbing the peace. Gucci talks about Alessa, and how she was killed thirty years ago.

A group of the cultists, led by Christobella, takes the two outsider women to a huge building where the demon is said to live. Rose takes an elevator to the lower levels, but the cultists beat Bennett half to death. Rise encounters a roomful of undead nurses, but they seem to only be active when her light is on. She switches it off and walks among them– until they wake up and attack anyway.

Rose hears Sharon/Alessa’s voice, and it tells about what happened to Alessa and her mother, Dahlia. The locals kidnapped Alessa and killed her for a sacrifice, but that went badly for the whole town. Alessa was horribly burned, and her hate grew so strong that she gained mental powers to get revenge on the town. Turns out, Sharon is Alessa’s own daughter, given to the orphanage to protect her from the monsters.

In the church, Christobella plans to finish what she started by sacrificing Sharon. They burn Bennett first. Rose shows up and talks about the world outside, at least until Christobella stabs her.

Suddenly, a hole opens in the floor and barbed wire snakes out. The real Alessa rises up, still confined to her bed, and she grabs Christobella with the wire. The wires and Rose set about slaughtering all the cultists. Dahlia comes in and recognizes her daughter.

In the morning, Rose and Sharon wake up and leave the church. They walk to the car and drive back out of the town, across the bridge. She calls Chris to say they’re coming home.

They arrive at their home, but it’s all dim and foggy, not like the sunny world that Chris still lives in. They’re still in two different worlds even though they’re in the same room…

Brian’s Commentary

Sean Bean didn’t die? Huh. Actually, he only interacted with Rose for a minute at the beginning, otherwise, his part is mostly unrelated to the action.

I’ve played a little bit of the original game, way back when it came out in 1999, and they’ve definitely got the atmosphere of the game here.

It’s well after two hours long, and it does drag quite a bit. Overall the visuals are excellent, but the story really drags in the middle.

It’s a weird one, for sure.

Kevin’s Commentary

It certainly does have a video game vibe to it.

The shots of the police and husband searching the “real” Silent Hill in the same locations simultaneously that Rose was in those same locations in the underworld were cool.

I liked the atmosphere, effects, and story, but it’s on the long side and drags after a while.