‘Return to Silent Hill’ Review: Video Game Adaptations Sink to a Mesmerizing New Low

Director Christophe Gans delivers another bizarre misfire for the beleaguered Konami franchise.

Konami’s “Silent Hill 2” is an exceptional, even historic work of horror media. But you wouldn’t know that judging by the video game’s baffling new film adaptation from Cineverse and Iconic Events. A nasty, claustrophobic display of staggering creative ineptitude — a dark fantasy packed with as many incomplete ideas as it has tired genre cliches — “Return to Silent Hill” squanders the rare opportunity to translate one of PlayStation’s most psychologically sophisticated worlds into box-office fuel. 

Directed by Christophe Gans, this ill-conceived reboot marks the French filmmaker’s return to the beloved horror franchise nearly two decades after adapting the original “Silent Hill” game with mixed results in 2006. Trapped in the same artistic era but chasing even worse market instincts now, the result is a deeper failure that reflects industry regression on several levels. Gans and his distributors demonstrate little understanding of what made the source material endure (“Silent Hill 2” was popular enough to inspire an acclaimed remake that just hit consoles in 2024), while simultaneously failing to speak the basic language of cinema that moviegoers who don’t know this IP might have received better.

Collapsing under the weight of its own confusion, “Return to Silent Hill” is still perversely fascinating to watch at points. Gans’ long-gestating comeback manifests as a relic that’s less an artifact of the gruesome Konami franchise itself than it is a random cultural scrap, ripped from a time when Hollywood mistook aesthetic fidelity and blind aggrandizement for understanding video games and their audience.

Here, the director (who has not helmed a feature film of any kind since 2014) eagerly embraces the foggy surrealism that once made “Silent Hill” feel so interactive and immersive. At the same time, Gans discards the psychological and spatial logic that gave meaning to the original telling’s dream-like sense of disorientation. What remains is a hollow exercise in subculture recognition and revival: a melodramatic maze that swaps exhausting exposition for emotional resonance and familiar iconography for real fear. 

Where the original video games allowed players to drift uneasily between reality and delusion, “Return to Silent Hill” aggressively literalizes the tumultuous inner world of hero James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine). The film opens not on a grieving widower inexplicably wandering into an abandoned town that evoke a long-lost memory, but with jarring flashbacks that introduce the ethereal, deceased Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson) through a slew of ill-fitting dramatic beats that play like gameplay cutscenes you’d rather watch at twice the speed on Twitch or YouTube.

Visually fragmented and structurally superfluous, those interstitial moments over-explain the couple’s tragic origin and demise, often in the same breath. Rather than trusting viewers to sit inside the ambiguity that made the “Silent Hill” games addictive in the first place, Gans constructs a clumsy heist-adjacent saga that feels like a half-baked apology for the trouble. Snapping backward and forward in time, piling muddy lore and shaky logistics on top of poorly established, even insincere stakes, this maddening saga is paradoxically overconfident and underdeveloped — lacking mystery and momentum.

That flattening effect extends to Silent Hill as a recognizable location, too. In the games, the ghost town operates as an ever-mutating mindspace. It’s responsive, symbolic, and deeply personal for the unlucky souls who are stranded there. But “Return to Silent Hill” presents a sometimes-fixed environment that’s governed by vague supernatural rules and loud, complex mythology. Essential puzzle pieces become thoughtless set ornaments in the movie, and the occult themes and clues that made the moral unease of “Silent Hill 2” a worthwhile meditation for gamers are reduced to incoherent messy gestures in theaters. 

Plot holes abound not because the film’s narrative is so meticulous as to be opaque, but because consequences barely exist in this flummoxing, lawless script (co-written by Gans, Sandra Vo-Anh, and Will Schneider). Violence occurs when violent acts are expected, and monsters arrive because they must. But struggling to maintain the pulse that Gans had a better handle on years ago, “Return to Silent Hill” loses the passion that made the director and his earlier characters worthy of so much empathy. 

Rather than beginning as an ordinary man whose traumatic repression curdles into lived horror, the new film introduces James as a cartoonishly detached widower. He’s the walking outline of a washed-up, featureless, drunk background character — delivering a one-note performance that’s a remarkable let-down coming from the actor once hand-picked by Steven Spielberg for “War Horse.” As an especially wooden James, Irvine moves through Silent Hill not as a victim unraveling but as an irritated participant weathering a string of weird, disjointed trials. James’ repeated cries, calling Mary’s name into the desolate landscape, land like an inhuman malfunction and distort this abstraction of grief even further. 

The creatures’ execution fares no better. Pyramid Head, a leather-wearing torturer and arguably the series’ most popular image, is inexplicably stripped of his built-in tension through congested staging that makes the villain appear mammoth but oddly insecure. Gans could have allowed the hulking, evil character to register as an oppressive, scene-stealing presence, but opts to force Pyramid Head into crowded frames with other monsters who, even at their best designed, frequently detract from the paltry terror and register as annoying visual noise. Even the infamous “Silent Hill” nurses suffer that fate, rushed through the action in a swarm that resembles the insects plastering the rest of this too-busy film. 

Afraid to stew in the authenticity of his own self-made nightmare, Gans can’t conjure dread by reanimating disconnected details. Yes, some filmmakers could get by using less emotion and showing more loyalty to the source material. But vexing, fan-favorite character Maria (also Hannah Emily Anderson) underscores the tonal divide that makes “Return to Silent Hill” feel like truly bad zombified art. With Maria rocking a dated, pink skirt and a brutally dumb butterfly tattoo, the definitive “Silent Hill” cool girl is presented as not just an aughts native but damning evidence the entire series lacks taste. 

Visibly out-of-place against an otherwise muted color palette, Maria’s original character design from 2001 was subtly recontextualized for the video game remake two years ago. But in “Return to Silent Hill,” she arrives as a total anachronism — seemingly freed from the confines of the off-grid, anime-forward costuming hellscape she and Blumhouse’s Terminator-inspired “M3GAN 2.0” must have come from. Maria’s scenes ultimately provoke laughter, not discomfort, and her arc devolves into accidental self-parody. The same can be said of the agitated and puke-covered Eddie (Pearse Egan), who more than any other “Silent Hill 2” victim resurrected for this atrocious reboot acts like he was better off dead.

Gans’ handling of ambience, once an obvious strength, has eroded as well. “Return to Silent Hill” is full of needless digital debris and the impact of all that CGI is as empty as any brainless superhero movie. Practical effects are scarce, and the game’s notorious array of Cronenberg-like antagonists have been mostly drained of their trademark physicality. Too often, set pieces and characters that should be crushing look like clutter, and even the sound design betrays a core misunderstanding of how horror movies fundamentally work. Japanese composer Akira Yamaoka’s iconic score returns in fragments, but it’s deprived of the purposeful repetition that made it a mental anchor in the games. Silence, which could salvage entire sequences of the movie, is rarely allowed to exist — let alone take full hold of the viewer.

This shortcoming of craft from Gans feels predictable looking at his limited track record as a director. But it feeds into a larger failure for video game adaptations across film and TV. “Return to Silent Hill” seems unsure whether it’s a clever, trauma-focused, prestige horror movie — or a goofy, otherworldly theater experience that’s intentionally unintelligible. What remains is an incongruously passive and intense ride that feels eerily algorithmic throughout. Kicking off 2026, the release’s timing only stands to sharpen fan disappointment. Horror thrives when filmmakers commit to clarity of purpose, whether through originality (see “Weapons”) or confident reinvention (“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple”). Even crowd-pleasing adaptations like “Five Nights at Freddy’s” succeed by understanding their niche audiences and leaning into ultra-specific tones. “Return to Silent Hill” does neither and ends up looking like slop. 

Cineverse’s decision to quietly release the reboot with limited promotional fanfare suggests an awareness of the movie’s flaws — but also a failure of stewardship. This was a chance to sell movie tickets to adult gamers who earnestly appreciate a smart horror universe, and the miscalculation that instead gave us a project we’re better off forgetting was avoidable, theoretically. Even still, Gans appears to have made the same type of film he would have 20 years ago, preserving the shape of “Silent Hill” before brutally stripping away the relevance another filmmaker might have been able to do justice.

In the long view, “Return to Silent Hill” is unlikely to earn the same generous reconsideration from gamers as Gans’ far more lovable 2006 film. Instead, this reboot might be misremembered as a direct-to-video curio — or rediscovered as a bad cult object destined to give some idiot cinephile alcohol poisoning. (If you’re ever streaming this at home, responsibly take a drink whenever James says, “What?” or “WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?!“) For now, it’s a cautionary tale: chilling proof that borrowing legendary video game symbolism without comparable skill remains the surest way to alienate a fanbase, on or off the console.

Grade: D-

From Cineverse and Iconic Events, “Return to Silent Hill” is now in theaters.

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