When it comes to horror video games, I've rarely ever dipped my toes into the dark waters of the Silent Hill franchise. I've honestly only ever played three games in the whole series. (And that's assuming the "P.T." demo from 2014 counts as an actual game.) That said, the extremely basic concept of Silent Hill – an abandoned town turns someone's inner demons into actual monsters – is an amazing foundation on which to build frightening psychological stories.
But I've always been more of a movie fan than a gamer. That's one of the big reasons I haven't played the majority of the franchise's games. But judging by the trailers alone, I just had to see the Silent Hill movie adaptations when they were released in 2006 and 2012. Knowing less about the franchise back then than I do now, I enjoyed the first movie while being immensely disappointed with its sequel. But now that I've slowly gotten more familiar with the games, I was genuinely excited when I heard there would be a new movie directly based on Silent Hill 2.
Though I haven't played the original PlayStation 1 version of Silent Hill 2 that was published by Konami in 2001, I adore its 2024 remake and was ready to walk into the new movie and absolutely love it. I'd seen its abysmally low score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I didn't care. I held out hope that the movie, titled Return to Silent Hill, would terrify me just as much as the remake of Silent Hill 2 did.
But as I sat in that theater, I began to realize that what I'd heard was correct. Return to Silent Hill is absolute garbage. There are not enough synonyms for the word "bad” to properly describe it. And the more I think about the movie, the more I go over the notes I scribbled down in the theater's parking lot to prepare for the writing of this review, the more upset I get. As a fan of the horror genre and of movies in general, I'm almost insulted by just how awful Return to Silent Hill is.
The movie follows James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), a struggling artist that was deeply in love with his girlfriend Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson). But the pair separated some time ago, and James has fallen into a spiral of deep depression and alcoholism without her. So when he receives a mysterious note from Mary that beckons him back to her hometown, a small New England town called Silent Hill, James drops everything to rush there.
Nothing about Silent Hill is how he remembers it, however. It is almost completely abandoned, most of the roads are closed off, and the town is blanketed in a thick fog and falling ash. He also encounters a small handful of locals that can't quite grasp why he would ever come back to Silent Hill at all. One of then, Maria (also played by Hannah Emily Anderson), even follows him around and tries talking him into leaving. But James remains adamant that Mary is somewhere to be found, continuing his search even as he discovers that Silent Hill is also now home to ungodly monsters and an alternate version of itself that is roughly equivalent to stepping into Hell.
I don't know if I could've prepared myself for just how bad Return to Silent Hill is. That's an odd statement to make, considering that nine times out of ten, a horror movie released in the Hollywood dumping ground that is January isn't going to be very good. But then there's the fact that I've seen practically no advertising for it whatsoever. There was a trailer posted on YouTube a few months ago, an occasional sponsored post on Facebook, some articles on the popular horror news site Bloody Disgusting (which is coincidentally owned by Cineverse, this movie's distributor), and that's been it. A horror movie released in January with minimal advertising, and it's based on a video game too... that's a bunch of red flags. The resounding consensus I saw after that trailer dropped was, "wow, Return to Silent Hill looks like it's gonna suck.” The consensus was right, because it absolutely did did suck.
I've seen a lot of bad movies, and a lot of bad video game adaptations, but it is baffling that everyone involved with making Return to Silent Hill decided that this was the best they could do. Were the producers exploiting some kind of tax shelter, like Uwe Boll used to do? Were they in danger of losing the film rights back to Konami if they didn't make something? Did they just not care?
I genuinely enjoyed the first Silent Hill movie twenty years ago. So when I saw its director, Christophe Gans, returning to the franchise twenty years later as this movie's director and co-writer, I wanted to get my hopes up. But as they said in The Shawshank Redemption, hope is a dangerous thing. Gans brings nothing to Return to Silent Hill. It is a lifeless, utterly miserable watch. There is no tension, any attempts at being scary are weak at best, and there is absolutely no subtlety whatsoever.
Gans also apparently decided that he wanted his storytelling to be as jarring as possible. On more than one occasion, he switches to a first-person perspective with no warning and for seemingly no reason other than it was briefly done in one Silent Hill 2 cutscene. He also haphazardly bounces us back and forth between current day and flashbacks, and between what's happening in Silent Hill and subplot about James's psychiatrist repeatedly trying (and failing) to contact him that becomes utterly inconsequential by the end of the movie.
I'm surprised at just how cheap the movie looked as well. I know the budget was very modest (I've heard somewhere around 23 million dollars), but it looks like they didn't spend a dime of it. The set design is poor, the CGI and green screen effects are really badly done, and the monster makeup effects often made me think Gans and his crew spent a day shopping at Spirit Halloween. I'm not joking about that, either. I've seen cosplayers dressed as Silent Hill's monsters at conventions that look better than what we see here. There's also a scene where we see James with a beard, and it is insanely obvious that the beard is a wig. There's no hiding it, you can see the seams and everything. It looks so spectacularly fake, I almost can't believe someone approved it being in front of the camera. If I had been directing this movie and saw Jeremy Irvine walk onto set wearing that thing, I would have immediately stopped filming so I could spend an hour screaming at the makeup department with all the rage I could muster.
Atmosphere is also one of the most important parts of the franchise as a whole, but Gans seemingly said "not in my movie, it isn't.” The overwhelming sense of oppressive dread from the video game version of this story is gone as well. Instead, there's just stuff going on at all times. There is no opportunity for anything that's happened to sink in. Something is always going on, along with a distracting amount of visual noise even when the movie tries to slow down. The feeling of loneliness as James walks around the town is utterly gone, as is the pure nightmare fuel of the town's hellish "Otherworld.”
Whenever you see a monster, it isn't a threat, just something that just shows up solely to be there. The popular "bubble head nurses” only appear as a swarm to be charged through at the end of the movie. The "Abstract Daddy,” one of the most disgusting monsters from the whole Silent Hill franchise for multiple reasons, shows up for maybe ten seconds before disappearing without a fight. Even "Pyramid Head,” the Silent Hill 2 creature who became so iconic that he's practically the franchise's mascot now, is just a distraction and not something to really be feared.
Some of this also comes from the script Gans co-wrote with Sandra Vo-Anh and William Schneider too. I can accept adaptations having to alter or outright remove things from the source material, because sometimes that just happens. Something might not translate well, or the story needs to be condensed to keep the adaptation from being excessively long. But Gans, Vo-Anh, and Schneider completely bungled this. There are changes made to the story that are either wholly unnecessary or painfully frustrating. The recurring character of James's therapist is new to the story and adds absolutely nothing to the movie.
I also found the alterations to what made it over from the game to be confusing. Eddie, an important supporting character from the game, relegated to a single scene that could've easily been cut from the movie with no harm done to its narrative. The changes to key plot points, among them the backstories and motivations of Mary, Laura, and Angela, also actively hurt the story and make the movie less scary. These changes to crucial elements of the original story take away much of the psychological and psychosexual horror that made both versions of Silent Hill 2 so terrifying.
This absolutely guts the original story's entire emotional core. One of the major reasons the Silent Hill franchise has been so popular is because the horror is derived from a myriad of deeply personal, almost taboo topics. Silent Hill 2 specifically shows us a traumatized rape victim blaming themselves for what's happened to them, someone's mental instability leading them to believe that killing others will fix their problems, and the toll a terminal illness takes on both the person diagnosed as well as their loved ones. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. On top of that, almost everything and everyone James encounters in the game's story is some kind of reflection of himself as well. James's mental health has reached a breaking point and his journey throughout the game is one that forces him to reconcile the choices he's made that have brought him to Silent Hill. Something similar has happened to Angela and Eddie, whose situations somewhat mirror his own. Their stories compliment James's in a way that still places him at the center of the overarching plot even beyond his deceptively simple role as the protagonist.
In the movie, Eddie has a small, pointless cameo and Angela has been completely overhauled into a local crazy girl (whose purpose in the story is also completely different now), with everything ultimately being about Mary. Everything is there because of her, everything is her fault when it shouldn't be. Flashbacks show us that Mary was part of a cult, and it led to tension between she and James. The inclusion of this cult as part of the movie does more harm that good. It contributes nothing beyond ruining the utter tragedy that was the story of Mary and James. The video game Mary was a cancer patient instead of a cult member, and the randomness of the disease leading to her ultimate fate was a driving part of James's journey. That's taken away with the introduction of the cult. I understand that a cult is part of some of the Silent Hill games, but it feels so out of place here. It not just affects how we view Mary, but how we view James as well. Video game James is haunted by Mary's death and his role in it, but movie James is just some sad drunk in a spooky town that has to fight his way out, eliminating any emotional impact there could've been.
And when I said earlier that there was no subtlety whatsoever, I meant it. The fact that Maria looks quite a bit like Mary is one thing, something the game itself touches on. But the ultimate revelation as to why Hannah Emily Anderson is playing three characters (with the aforementioned Angela being the third) feels so hackneyed that I wouldn't have believed the movie did it if I hadn't seen it myself. And this lack of subtlety is especially obvious by the bold decision the writers made to turn the subtext into just the text by outright stating what Pyramid Head symbolizes with absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever, to the point that it felt like they were trying to hit the audience over the head with it.
The minuscule cast is also poor, but considering how badly written their characters are written, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The supporting characters are all forgettable, but then you barely ever see them anyway, so it's not really of any concern whether they were good or bad. Jeremy Irvine and Hannah Emily Anderson are the only actors on screen for the majority of the movie, with Anderson playing three characters as I said earlier, while Irvine is given the task of being the person who the movie is supposed to gravitate around.
Anderson is given practically nothing to do despite having three roles to play, with none of them being particularly deep. There's nothing for her to sink her teeth into with these roles. It's especially bad with Angela, is (as I said earlier) painted as the shallow "crazy local girl" trope for much of the movie despite being such a tragic character in the games.
Irvine, meanwhile, is supposed to be the main character, but he's just so damn boring. There's no gravitas to his performance. Saying that the James Konami gave us in 2001 and 2024 was a guilt-ridden man being eaten alive by heartache and the memories of his wife doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the character. But Irvine's just kinda... there. They tell you he's upset about Mary, but Irvine never tries to make you believe it. His performance feels hollow, almost like he was told to just say his lines, hit his marks, and don't put any thought into what he was doing. It's another in a long line of things that ruins the emotional weight of what could've been something tragic.
We are only three weeks into 2026, and we've already been given a contender for one of the worst movies of the year. You might be thinking to yourself, "If you wanted the game, why not just play the game?” That isn't the point. I'm not saying Return to Silent Hill necessarily needed to be a 1:1 translation of Silent Hill 2. Look at Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, for example. It is widely considered a poor adaptation of Stephen King's novel but is still heralded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. You don't need to do the exact same thing beat for beat, note for note as long as it's still a good movie. But holy shit, Return to Silent Hill is both a terrible adaptation and a terrible movie. It either misunderstood, ignored, or just failed at doing every single thing that made the original Silent Hill 2 such a gripping story.
Even when divorced from the video games and viewed on its own merits, Return to Silent Hill is still abysmal. It's as if everyone involved in the movie, from the top of the credits to the bottom, just shrugged their shoulders and said, "yeah, whatever.” The only person involved who seemed to put forth any effort was composer Akira Yamaoka, and all he even did was re-record his beautiful and haunting music from the video games. Return to Silent Hill is the kind of bad movie that comes along just once in a while, the kind of bad movie that you just can't believe exists and that someone would be okay with releasing to the general public. It feels like an amateur movie that would be made by kids that had neither a budget nor talent.
The saddest part of all this? Evie Templeton – who provided Laura's voice in the Silent Hill 2 remake – actually plays the character here too, and they never gave her the chance to say Laura's "see ya, fart face!” line from the game. I might've actually given the movie a good review if they'd done just that. But much like the people that visit the eponymous town, we can't have nice things in Return to Silent Hill.
Final Rating: *
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