Strangely fitting that director Christophe Gans' long-delayed Return to Silent Hill often resembles a misaligned memory of a PlayStation 2 playthrough that was completed decades earlier. In the quarter century since, all of the characters have become smushed together in the player's head; their fictional motivations and backstories interconnecting then overlapping until we arrive at a misinformed, misreading of the video game's sprawling events. This is a hundred minute adaptation of a fifteen hour game though, isn't it at least economically laudable to retain all of the principle personalities? Even if this can only be accomplished by making each of them some stained aspect of either Hannah Emily Anderson's Mary or Jeremy Irvine's James? Perhaps I'm just sympathetic to this reorganisation because, when playing Bloober Team's recent remake of Silent Hill 2, I was convinced that Maria, the scantily dressed doppelgänger of a dearly missed wife, was being positioned as a flickering, vulnerable reincarnation.
Instead, as it turns out, this tattooed duplicate is a temptress dreamt up or manifested to lock your in-game character into a disappointing ending. That human recollection is both unreliable and frequently misleading is a key attribute in any (re)telling of Mary and James' story though, so why shouldn't these inconsistencies turn in on themselves, altering our understanding of these dreamlike events? Return to Silent Hill's somnambulist acting and gobbledygook dialogue even serve to accentuate this sense of detachment then, registering as fragments that have been pushed and pulled across several text translation tools. The boldest shake-up offered by Gans (co-writing with Sandra Vo-Anh and Will Schneider) though is the decision to map the revolting, familial abuse experienced by the mousy Angela character onto Mary. This particular revision not only allowing for much more miserable, even shameful, notes of secrecy to creep into a central relationship that was previously only experienced from a male perspective but also aligning this otherwise disconnected story with the child endangering doomsday cults seen in Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. You know, for people who enjoy lore.
