Silent Hill

Just watched the movie adaptation of Silent Hill, a Konami / Team Silent computer game, available on platforms, such as PC, Playstation and XBox.
It stars Radha Mitchell (the female lead in one of my favourite films, Pitch Black) and Sean Bean, and was directed by Christophe Gans.

The story concerns a family, who's adopted daughter sleepwalks and has nightmares of a place called Silent Hill. To cut a long story short, the daughter and mother end up (via a car accident) in the small town in West Virginia, decimated by coal fires thirty years prior, and long since evacuated. Although, of course, no such town exists in reality, in fact, most of the movie was filmed in Canada (Ontario, to be precise). The mother (and a female cop who also finds herself in the town) then heads out to rescue her the daughter from a bunch of witch-burning puritans, led by a fanatical leader, Christabella (wonderfully played by Alice Krige, she of star trek / borg queen fame).

To be honest, the movie (as is unfortunately the case with computer game adaptations) is far from the best film I've ever seen, but it's certainly not the worst. The effects (mostly physical effects, rather than CGI) are good, even very good in places, some of the scenes are quite eerie, whilst the acting from most of the cast certainly doesn't do them any injustice. It's let down, I suppose, by being a bit, how can I put it?, daft. Even the suspension of disbelief, in places, isn't enough to overcome certain problems, not least of which is believing how a small town police department would be able to keep the "truth" about the events leading up to the major fire from either the authorities and / or the media.

The ending (spoiler alert) lends itself to the "film with a twist ending" genre, in the same style Sixth Sense, or The Others, with all of the town being dead, stuck in a "limbo" of sorts, even the girl, mother and cop, although you don't realise this until the end when the two return "home".

All in all, (as per usual), it's worth the rental fee, and certainly won't be the worst movie you'll see this year.