Return to Silent Hill Review: Sequel Speedruns the Superior Original

How often does a filmmaker get to make a sequel to a 20-year-old film? In 2006, Christophe Gans directed Silent Hill, an adaptation of the smash hit survival horror game from Japanese publisher Konami. Now he returns to grimy supernatural terror with stand-alone sequel Return to Silent Hill.

For the first film, Gans understood what made Silent Hill unique: a sense of constant impending doom, a nightmarish internal logic, and villains that seemed more driven by blind instinct than malice. Moreover, he captured that distinctive aesthetic that mixed soot and rust and pus. Under game director Keiichiro Toyama, developer Team Silent put corruption on PlayStation discs, and Gans’ version of the abandoned town of Silent Hill brought that to the big screen, filtered through the Satanic celluloid of Italian Seventies horror and the grimy darkness of the New French Extremity. In hindsight, his was one of the best video game movies, but was too quickly shoved in the same discount bin as Andrzej Bartkowiak’s bloated Doom and Uwe Boll’s trifecta of misery, House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne. It arguably killed Gans’ directing career, as his only directing credit in the intervening two decades was his derivative 2016 version of Beauty and the Beast.

Gans was supposed to direct a Silent Hill sequel over a decade ago. However, that fell apart and the end result was instead M.J. Bassett directing Silent Hill: Revelation, a film that re-enforced every cliché about bad movie adaptations of video games. The question that hangs over Return to Silent Hill is how close Gans would hold to what he created in his superior 2006 version.  

What will be quickly apparent to fans of the console version is that, unlike the original plotline of the first film, Gans is drawing much more directly from Silent Hill 2, and specifically the 2024 remastering, even pulling in cast members from that refresh. What’s closest is the script, which sees moody artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine, Benediction, Stonewall) heading to the town of Silent Hill to meet up with his lost love, Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson, Jigsaw, What Keeps You Alive). That she’s been dead for years, and that when he reaches Silent Hill it’s a rotting, rusted hell on Earth, immediately shows that this won’t be your average reunion of lovers.

Back in 2006, Gans showed a strange restraint, letting the tone and design radiate gloom and despair. Return to Silent Hill is much more immediate, and that’s to its detriment. When he re-runs certain scenes and images from the first film, like the disturbingly fleshy bugs, the faceless nurses and the iconic Pyramid Head, this newer version feels flatter and less upsetting. Relocating filming from Canada to Germany and Serbia really dents any sense of continuity and location, since Lake Amer cannot pass for rural Maine.

Yet the sequel’s true weak point is in the performances the script permits. The original starred Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean as a married couple separated by the shadows of Silent Hill, and the depth of their bonds gave them a sense of connection even when they were apart. Irvine is chasing ghosts, even when he faces what are clearly other iterations of Mary (played by Anderson and game star Evie Templeton). He’s just not given enough to do, and any emotional beats are undercut by a completely unnecessary voiceover that presumes the audience cannot work out what’s going on. In fact, most viewers are likely to be well ahead of any revelations. The plot and character development remains early-2000s video game level, a fact made even more disappointing because Gans added so much more to the first film. This time, he co-wrote the script with his Beauty and the Beast collaborator Sandra Vo-Anh and William Josef Schneider (best known for the dismal 2024 reboot of The Crow), and the end result feels lesser than the game or the first film.

Return to Silent Hill

2025, R, 106 min. Directed by Christophe Gans. Starring Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson, Evie Templeton.

⭐⭐

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

[Editor’s note: This story was updated to say that Radha Mitchell starred in the original Silent Hill movie. We originally stated it was Naomi Watts. The Chronicle regrets the error.]

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