Silent Hill -- 2006 -- R

As I understand it, this film is an adaptation of a video game, but having never played the game, I am left to look at this film like a movie, likely much to the distress of those who played the game (sort of like my Final Fantasy VII review where I was told to shove it because I didn't understand the game). That being said, I'll only thumb my nose once before plunging in.

I thought this was a clever little horror flick actually. We begin with a mother frantically searching for her little girl before finding her standing over a veritable abyss next to a waterfall. The mother, Rose, rescues the daughter, Sharon, as she nearly throws herself to her death repeating the words, "Silent Hill." Well, a quick research online reveals Silent Hill to be a ghost town in West Virginia, so Rose decides to run her daughter, who we learn was adopted from West Virginia, out to Silent Hill in an attempt at therapy.

From there, we go on this little adventure inside this town of Rose looking for Sharon. A lot of really weird stuff goes on with a darkness that envelops the place and a constant snowing of ashes. The claustrophobia of the film really ups the creep factor a lot, and sometimes we're placed in almost total darkness with only the sounds around us. Very well done there.

But...we're not without some down sides. First, the lead manages to find a flashlight that works. This town has been shut down for 30 years, and Rose walks into an abandoned office and finds a flashlight that works. This was completely unbelievable. After all the horror, this really hurt it for me. I would have accepted her having a flashlight in her truck or something, but to find one in town? You gotta be kidding.

They also ran up against this weird zombie thing with acid blood. This thing only appeared once and could have been those things in the dark too. It never received any kind of explanation for what it was or what it existed. It just seems like something that looks weird and creepy and that's why it's there. This works for a video game, but not so good for a movie.

Finally, the ending. This is what the audience takes away from a film and it is critical to it working or not. I kind of understood from the parallel storylines that Rose and Sharon were in a sort of parallel world to our own. This is not a spoiler, it is actually revealed very early on in the film, but when we hit the end, this phenomenon is never explained. We reach a sort of satisfying conclusion to what happens in Silent Hill, and then end up in a sort of limbo'd state of ambiguity. It left me kind of empty. I was surprised when the credits started rolling. Kind of bummed me out.

In the end, I liked it. It had some good adventure, good scares, good suspense, but an ending that left me hanging. Still recommend it, though. Some people like ambiguous endings.