“You’re banned from picking movies from now on.” That was what my friend told me immediately after we saw “Return to Silent Hill” in theatres.
“Return to Silent Hill,” released on Jan. 23, 2026, is a film adaptation of the video game “Silent Hill 2.” The video game is widely regarded as a masterpiece.
However, “Return to Silent Hill” is a bad movie.
When I watched it opening night with my friends the most familiarity I had with the original game was the soundtrack. Made by Akira Yamaoka, the score falls into the genre of trip hop, a more atmospheric electronic relative to hip-hop. Great stuff to listen to while pulling an all-nighter. Because I love the music I walked away satisfied.
However, the more I thought about the pacing and what the film was trying to say, everything fell apart. It was like writing down an idea from a dream only to wake up and see its abstract gibberish that never really made sense.
The film pulls elements and characters from the video game, but changes the story. “Return to Silent Hill” follows James Sunderland grappling with the abuse and estrangement of his girlfriend Mary Crane. The film jumps from the two meeting and falling love to a sorry state in the present James.
James Sunderland, in the game, is someone losing their grip on reality and is unambiguously not a good person. James Sunderland of “Return to Silent Hill,” played by Jeremy Irvine, feels like a hotter, cooler version of video game James. We quite literally begin the movie with James driving fast in his car lighting a joint as loud music plays.
The inciting incident, both in the game and film, is when James gets a letter from Mary, something we later learn should be impossible. He immediately gets in his car to return to Silent Hill, the town they fell in love in.
The town is a complete hellscape. Ash falls from the sky without reason. Every building has been abandoned by people, now inhabited by something far worse.
After a chance encounter with a strange creature spitting bile from the center of its chest, James meets other humans trapped in the town. He also meets Pyramid Head, a gargantuan menacing presence that is the unstoppable force in the immovable object of Silent Hill. You don’t need to be much of a “Silent Hill” fan to know who Pyramid Head is; his helmet is iconic in horror. Way back in 2006, in the first “Silent Hill” movie when he catches someone he doesn’t just kill them, he rips their skin off and throws it at the door of a church.
All this to say, how “Return to Silent Hill” used Pyramid Head, like nearly everything else in the film, was disappointing. When James hides from the monster in a closet and is discovered by Pyramid Head, the camera cuts between the two of them as a siren blares in the distance, cutting shots in tandem with the siren. Each cut gets faster as the siren gets louder and louder. I understand this is meant to be a tense moment, but it lasts way too long. At a certain point horror can become plain annoying.
After this, James encounters a woman who looks exactly like Mary, named Maria. Just watching the E3 trailer for the game, Maria is a character meant to put you on edge. In the game, James is struck by how absurd the resemblance is. Meanwhile in the film, Maria is the one to point out the similarity. In fact, Maria in the film is the most nonthreatening character in the entire film.
The film then jumps back to James and Mary’s breakup — which feels bizarre. “Silent Hill 2” as a game is known for being surreal and uncanny, but the acting during their breakup in the movie just feels stiff. It’s revealed that Mary is in a cult where she drinks poison and participates in strange rituals. (And no, the cult stuff is not in the game at all.) When the two first met, Mary is actually trying to leave Silent Hill. Because she met James, she misses her bus and stays instead. Later, it’s revealed that because of the cult rituals Mary became gravely ill. James blames himself for getting in the way of her leaving.
This plot thread feels incredibly unnecessary. Mary does get sick out of the blue and isn’t able to enjoy life anymore — but there’s no cult to spice things up. For someone who has watched loved ones lose their ability to live their lives and slowly lose their lucidity, this was a powerful element the film failed to handle.
When we jump back to James and Maria, they are exploring a hospital, believing Mary might be somewhere inside. The two are bombarded by a horde of mutilated nurses covered in bandages lurching towards them. Briefly, the film shifts from horror to action as James begins mowing down the crowd with a pipe. Unfortunately, he lets some slip past him which results in Maria getting stabbed. James abandons her and finds an otherworldly moth version of Mary, who violently embraces James lifting him off, sending him into a hallucination.
Another thing to mention is how the film reuses its actors, or I should say actress. You see, Mary, Maria, and Angela, another woman, are all played by the same actress, Hannah Emily Anderson. Turns out almost everyone he met in Silent Hill is actually a manifestation of Mary. Because they use the same actress, I find their costuming to have mixed results. Angela, who James encounters when he first returns to Silent Hill, looks nothing like Mary. Yet Maria, who is meant to look like Mary, feels off. Her outfit is a good recreation from the game, except it feels plastic somehow. Like Anderson is someone cosplaying Maria, not Anderson portraying Maria.
I think part of the reason characters feel so off in the movie is the lack of this gritty ambience. The set itself embodies decay, but the actors are always portrayed fashionably. We never get to see the ugliness of James or Maria.
This is with the sole exception of the CGI, which was especially terrible. Good cgi is so subtle that you can’t tell its fake fire, or at the very least your suspension of disbelief lets you look past it. “Return to Silent Hill” CGI feels like it’s a few steps away from “Sharkboy and Lavagirl” — which is to say the green screens are very conspicuous.
Also absent, despite being ubiquitous to the game, is the fog. When James first arrives in the film, the town is covered in fog, but the fog is essential for the game. It adds a layer of haze that not only keeps you on edge of what it might be hiding, it also adds an incredible ambience that pairs well with the score. In the film we lose all of the horror of what could be in the fog by being shown exactly what’s lurking around the corner. Because we never build suspense moments that would otherwise feel climactic come from nowhere. Sometimes it’s scarier to imagine what could be lurking in the dark than whatever the filmmakers could ever show you.
When we return to James, he is in a hospital being treated for his delusions. Mary has been dead this whole time. After they broke up, Mary became ill and asked James to kill her. He does this by putting a pillow over her head until she stops moving. Now he is obsessed with saving her in his daydreams. This is a major difference from the game, in which she does not ask to be killed — James just kills her because James is not a good person.
When James returns to his delusion of Silent Hill, he sees Maria as a doppelganger and summons Pyramid Head behind her, who kills her. In navigating the complexities of grief and guilt in a story like “Return to Silent Hill,” there should be a level of media literacy to parse what a character like Pyramid Head might represent. Contrary to that, I can’t stress enough how force fed to you what the director wants you to think the pyramid head should represent. Not only do we have the egregious cutting between James and Pyramid Head earlier in the film, showing they are connected, we also see James paint a portrait of himself only to draw the outline of a pyramid over it. The moment Maria is impaled by Pyramid Head, the camera zooms in a crack in his helm, showing James underneath the mask.
As the film reaches its climax (somehow none of what I’ve already summarized was the climax), James apologizes to moth Mary and puts her (now regular Mary) corpse into his car. The two drive into the lake, sinking to its bottom, a semi-faithful recreation of one of the game’s six endings.
Just when you think it’s over, the film then cuts back to the beginning,with James in his car. Only this time when he meets Mary, he offers her a ride and the two drive away from Silent Hill while “Deja Vu,” a song that sounds similar to “Promise (Reprise),” my favorite song in the original game soundtrack, plays.
“Return to Silent Hill” feels more like fanfiction about the game than a faithful adaptation. The ending is by far the most disappointing. Not every story needs a sad ending, but this one did.To watch them almost follow through on that only to time travel back to the start feels like losing chess to a dog.
What’s worse is that most people, myself included, will never play the original game. Those of us who knew little about the original game when we went to see it thought the film was a bit all over the place but a solid C-tier horror movie. The more you know about the game, the more you realize how bad the movie is.
Looking up if there is a way to play “Silent Hill 2” on PC pulls up a reddit post of people discussing fan editions. There is also a recent remake of “Silent Hill 2,” however it suffers a lot of similar changes stylistically that the film does. While it makes sense to upgrade graphics for a game made in 2001 so people are more likely to buy it, something is lost. The original limitations became so intrinsic that when you remove them you take parts of its identity away.
It is disappointing what this film could’ve been had it stayed true to the original. Instead, the best way to experience the original is watching others play it on YouTube and trying to cross the uncanny valley between experiencing one of the greatest horror games of all time through proxy.
