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| A mouthless girl with grey, ghostly eyes and a decaying paint face entreats you from this poster to see Christophe Gans' Silent Hill |
A mother drives her adopted daughter to a ghost town called Silent Hill that the girl talks of in her sleep. This proves to be a place with some dark secrets.
Silent Hill is written by Roger Avary (Glitterati (2004)), based on Konami's same-titled 1999 Playstation game, and directed by Christophe Gans (Crying Freeman (1995)).
The film makes no sense to me: SPOILER Silent Hill is a parallel universe with monsters from environmental disasters (it seems?), and a religious demon cult. It is incredible to me that Avary, who had made the masterful Rules of Attraction (2002) shortly before, would fall into this CGI-fueled pit of a film.
Silent Hill does produce great discomfort for its viewers and also boasts some really sick inventions, but as for narrative stringency, building atmosphere and tension, and, most importantly, real scares; this is an empty drum.
Gans gives a 2-minute interview about the film here
Cost: 50 mil. $
Box office: 97.6 mil. $
= Big flop (returned 1.95 times its cost)
[Silent Hill premiered 20 April (Hollywood, California) and runs 125 minutes. Gans had reportedly lobbied to attain the film rights for 5 years, eventually getting them after sending an interview of himself explaining what he would do with the property. Shooting took place in Ontario, including Toronto, and in Manitoba, Canada from April - July 2005. Sony Pictures bought the US and Latin America distribution rights for 14 mil. $. The film opened #1 to a 20.1 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another weekend in the top 5 (#4) and grossed 46.9 mil. $ (47.6 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 6.7 mil. $ (6.9 %) and France with 5.8 mil. $ (5.9 %). The film made in excess of 22.1 mil. $ from North American home video sales of 1.3 mil. units in 4 weeks, which, if added into the calculation, would change its status to that of a minor flop. Roger Ebert gave the film a 1½/4 star review, translating to a notch harder than this one. Michael J. Bassett directed the sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation (2012), which got even worse reviews but was a box office success. Gans didn't return for 8 years before his Beauty and the Beast/La Belle et la Bête (2014). Radha Mitchell (The Crazies (2010)) returned in Pu-239 (2006). Silent Hill is rotten at 30 % with a 4.52/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Silent Hill?
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