Silent Hill

2006 · ★★★

Better than I remembered, which isn't saying as much as it sounds like. The Dark Time sequences still hold up — genuinely unsettling design work — but the film collapses under the weight of a third-act explanation that goes on forever and lands flat. That single breathless info-dump is the structural problem and the pacing never recovers.

The ending at least suits the mood. You finish with the same dulled resignation the characters feel returning to their foggy nowhere, which is a kind of achievement, I suppose. Whether that's what you want from a horror movie is another question.

The franchise's failure makes more sense now than it did when it first came out. It has the same problem that eventually gutted the Hellraiser sequels: what exactly is the fear you're selling? This is a haunted house movie at its core, and there's no shortage of examples in that subgenre that demonstrate what actually works and yet this movie chose a resolution that was flat, dull and full of sorrow but that is emotionally incoherent. We are being asked to grieve an outcome that isn't a loss. The young tortured girl got what she wanted. The heroes of the story did the thing, so what gives? Had this film landed with a more clear-sighted ending it would be more prominently regarded today.