Silent Hill

The Film

Note: this portion of the review is the same as that of my earlier review of the US Blu-ray release.

In an attempt to put an end to the terrifying nightmares experienced by her stepdaughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), Rose (Radha Mitchell) drives off in the dead of night, driving towards the very town in which Sharon's nightmares take place, the ominous Silent Hill. Upon arriving, they find the place to be a virtual ghost town, hidden beneath a blanket of ash that falls from the sky like snow, and populated by a variety of raving lunatics and hideously deformed, murderous demons. Things take a turn for the worst when Sharon vanishes without a trace. Rose resolves to brave the dangers of hellish town and rescue her daughter from the waking nightmare in which she now finds herself trapped...

It would not be too much of a stretch to describe Silent Hill as the best video game to film adaptation so far. Pickings have been woefully slim for this seemingly cursed sub-genre, in which adaptations tend to be described not in terms of how good they are but rather how bad they could have been, and the abominations of Uwe Boll and his ilk have destroyed more or less all credibility for this section of the industry. That's not be say that there haven't been any enjoyable offerings - on the contrary, even the worst ones can at least claim to be so bad they're good - but Silent Hill is definitely in a different league: a mature, adult and genuinely unsettling horror film that, despite some rather clichéd and nonsensical plot elements, treats its audience - both fans of the game and newcomers - with respect, and works as an engaging movie in its own right rather than a mere brand name.


This is, in a nutshell, everything that Resident Evil should have been. Paul W.S. Anderson's 2002 attempt to bring the survival horror franchise to the big screen may have been effective enough as an undemanding action movie, but even its staunchest defenders would agree that, as an adaptation, it is an extremely unfaithful one, conveying none of the tone and atmosphere of the games on which it purported to have been based. Anderson's defence, and a perfectly valid one at that, was that simply translating the game verbatim to the silver screen would have been boring, as there would have been no surprise, but, with Silent Hill, Christophe Gans does just that, even retaining Akira Yamaoka's musical themes from the game series, and yet manages to craft a film that is continually engaging in spite of its two-hour running time.

The biggest change between game and film is the decision of Gans and his screenwriter, Roger Avary, to make the protagonist female rather than male. In fact, barring the appearance of Sean Bean as the heroine's husband, and a handful of unimportant male bit players, all the characters in the film are women, something that the studio executives apparently had great difficulty accepting. Bean's character was added at their behest in a rewrite, and his scenes, which are by far the least engaging in the film, constitute its only real flaw. This all-girl configuration also characterised Neil Marshall's 2005 horror film The Descent, in this viewer's opinion one of the finest entries in the genre in the last decade, and it proves to be oddly effective, perhaps because it allows the films in question to avoid the usual horror pitfalls of relegating female characters to predictable victim roles. There are women of all sorts in Silent Hill: strong women, weak women, good women, evil women, and all of them are interesting to some degree. Former Neighbours star Radha Mitchell makes for an excellent heroine, someone the audience can both relate to and root for, while Alice Krige, clearly borrowing to some extent from Piper Laurie in Carrie, proves to be a chilling religious zealot.


What is most impressive about the film, however, is not the performances but the palpable air of dread with which Gans imbues every scene. The exteriors of Silent Hill are chillingly quiet and deathly beautiful, while the various monsters, most of which look like they stepped out of the game itself, are imaginative and genuinely imposing, despite the occasional ropey bit of CGI. Indeed, the entire film is beautifully shot, with Gans contrasting the sparseness of the ash-covered town with the claustrophobia of the various enclosed spaces in which Rose finds herself trapped. The perversely imaginative design sense of Carol Spier, David Cronenberg's production designer of choice, is readily evident at all times. Most importantly, the audience, and the world in which the film takes place, are treated with respect at all times, with the creative team never feeling the need to wink to the viewers or in any way cheapen the proceedings simply because the source material is "just" a game (Tomb Raider this is not).

I can't say enough good things about Silent Hill. As a video game adaptation, it must be nothing short of a miracle, given that virtually every previous attempt to bring a game franchise to the big screen has been either average or abysmal. As a stand-alone product, however, it is no less impressive: a dark, disturbing and uniquely-styled horror film with a great cast and fiendishly imaginative visuals to spare. Highly recommended.

HD DVD Presentation

Silent Hill was originally released on Blu-ray in the US last August as one of Sony's first titles for the format. Featuring an MPEG2-encoded transfer on a single-layer BD25 disc, this release came under a lot of flack from critics, and indeed this title built up a reputation in certain circles as a perfect example of the fledgling format's less than stellar initial slate of releases. This transfer, however, has been unfairly maligned, and, if certain people genuinely believe this to be a poor example of a high definition presentation, then I am of the opinion that they are in serious need of a new set of viewing criteria. Yes, the Blu-ray release suffers from some noticeable compression problems in a select number of scenes, but in terms of detail it is as good as justly-lauded greats like King Kong and Casino Royale. Visual information is present down to an individual pixel level, somethat than can be said of a minuscule number of titles.

Ever since I first saw Sony's release, I always felt that, had exactly the same master been afforded a higher bit rate or run through a modern codec, the results would have been phenomenal. Luckily, German distributor Concorde Home Entertainment has heard my pleas, and the results are indeed phenomenal.

Released simultaneously on both HD DVD and Blu-ray, the German release features a VC1 encode of what appears to be exactly the same master that Sony used for their earlier release (the only difference being the substitution, on this version, of the Focus Features logo, for the TriStar logo found at the start of Sony's release). It's presented accurately in its original aspect ratio of 2.39:1, and encoded at 1080p. It is a beautiful transfer from start to finish, every bit as razor sharp in terms of detail as its Sony counterpart, while eliminating the occasionally nasty compression artefacts. The reproduction of the grain is absolutely magnificent, and the colours, which are rich to the point of oversaturation in the sequences taking place outside Silent Hill, and grey and dreary in the ones set inside it, accurately reproduce the film's theatrical presentation.

This is one of the best transfers I have ever seen (falling just shy of my top five of Open Season, King Kong, Corpse Bride, Casino Royale and The Descent), and I urge readers who already own Sony's version to strongly consider replacing their copies with this new release.


It is on the audio front that Concorde have let the side down slightly. Two audio options are included: a DTS-HD Master Audio 6.1 track in German, and a DTS-HD Hi-Resolution 5.1 track in English. It's somewhat irritating to see a dub being given preferential treatment, but even so, the English track is impressive. At this point, I feel it only fair to point out that, as a Playstation 3 owner without an HDMI-compliant audio receiver, I have been unable to sample the PCM track of Sony's release, which is reportedly excellent, in anything other than plain old stereo, so I have no way of knowing how the DTS-HD track on this release compares to it. A comparison between it and the Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 Kbps) track on the Sony release, however, reveals little appreciable difference in terms of audio quality, barring the fact that the DTS-HD track is mixed slightly quieter. After adjusting the volume levels to compensate, however, I was unable to differentiate between them in a blind test, which leads me to afford this release the same audio score of "9" as I did for the Sony release.

The only subtitles that are included are German. These become enabled by default when the English audio track is selected, but can easily be disabled by using the disc's audio setup menu (the remote control's audio and subtitle buttons are disabled for this disc).

Extras

As with the Sony version, this release of Silent Hill, like all of Concorde's initial batch of HD titles, is completely bare-bones.

Overall

Constituting a distinct improvement over the earlier Sony Pictures release in terms of image quality, Concorde Home Entertainment's release of Silent Hill features an amazing transfer and impressive audio. Despite being bare-bones, I highly recommend that fans of the film, or those who are just dying to add another magnificent-looking disc to their HD collections, get their order in immediately.