Return to Silent Hill (2026) Review

Until shows like ‘The Last of Us’ and ‘Fallout’, decent video game adaptations were almost non-existent. For whatever reason, they proved an elusive nut to crack. From the bizarre ‘Super Mario Bros.’ surreally starring Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, to Steven E. de Souza’s ridiculously camp ‘Street Fighter’ and what feels like about fifty unbelievably trashy Uwe Boll-helmed efforts, there are so many bad examples to draw on, it almost feels like its own genre.

‘Return to Silent Hill’ is the third attempt in twenty years to bring the video game series ‘Silent Hill’ to the screen. Billed as a “faithful” adaptation of ‘Silent Hill 2,’ it follows James Sunderland, a disillusioned artist pining for his lost love Mary. After receiving a mysterious letter, he travels back to her hometown, Silent Hill. However, the town has twisted into something unrecognisable, leading James to question not just what he sees, but his own sanity.

Whether or not the film is faithful to the game series is somewhat beside the point. It should work as a standalone feature, much like the ‘Fallout’ show, which is accessible to fans and newcomers alike. So, does it? Not really. Directed by Christophe Gans, the film is a messy affair: a scattershot psychological horror more ramblingly incoherent than frightening.

Written by Gans, Sandra Vo-Anh and Will Schneider, the narrative doesn’t make much sense. If one is unfamiliar with the video game it is based on, one is left completely out in the cold. Once James arrives in Silent Hill, the film slips into a repetitive cycle of wandering through ash-covered streets, stumbling into abandoned buildings and meeting characters who seem to have stepped out of an entirely different world.

On his quest, James encounters a handful of grotesque beasts- armless, twitching figures who move like extras from David Bowie’s Blackstar music video, swarms of cockroaches that could have crawled out of Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’- and a rotating cast of oddballs who speak in stilted, unnatural (and often expository) dialogue. A chap named Eddie, for instance, delivers his lines with the halting cadence of someone ten drinks down, while a ghostly little girl named Laura drifts in and out of scenes with no clear purpose. There’s also a towering figure with a metal triangle for a head, as well as a woman who looks uncannily like Mary, albeit in a distractingly unconvincing wig.

What does it all mean? It might be clear to gamers, but to viewers unfamiliar with the world and lore, it’s confounding. Very little is explained, and the few answers we do get are delivered with a heavy hand, muddying the film’s attempts at psychological depth. Flashbacks hint at grief, trauma and cult activity, but the pieces never cohere into anything meaningful. Instead of feeling intriguingly ambiguous, the story simply feels undercooked- a collection of ideas thrown together without a clear sense of how they’re meant to connect.

However, the film’s production design and art direction are impressively immersive. Silent Hill looks genuinely ravaged, like a place abandoned by time and memory, its empty streets and crumbling interiors steeped in quiet decay. If one is feeling generous, one could say the town itself reflects James’s fractured inner life, an externalisation of grief and guilt made concrete. Yet this potential is never fully realised. The setting remains just that- an environment- striking to look at but thematically inert, offering atmosphere in place of insight.

That visual strength extends, to a degree, into the film’s cinematography and sound design. Pablo Rosso’s camerawork is frequently inspired, framing Silent Hill in stark, oppressive compositions emphasising its scale and emptiness. The sound design is similarly ominous, dominated by industrial drones and low, unearthly groans suggesting an ever-present menace. Akira Yamaoka’s melancholic score also adds to the film’s atmosphere, its mournful tones suggesting a depth and emotional coherence the film never actually possesses.

As James, Jeremy Irvine ably conveys confusion and determination, reacting believably to the strange and unsettling world around him. However, there’s little for him to do beyond that, as the character is written thinly and left stranded by the film’s incoherent narrative. Hannah Emily Anderson similarly tries her best as Mary, as well as her doppelganger, but isn’t given anything interesting to play with. Their supporting cast does little to attract attention, good or bad; though Evie Templeton is suitably creepy as Laura.

The late, great Norm Macdonald was on Conan O’Brien’s show one evening. After Norm finished a deliberately drawn-out joke, Andy Richter quipped “it’s like you take us on this long hike, and at the end you show us a pebble.” This sums up Christophe Gans’ ‘Return to Silent Hill’- except the viewer doesn’t even get a pebble.

It’s a film with atmosphere to spare but nowhere to take it. Although decently acted and visually striking, it lacks coherence. As an adaptation, it gestures at faithfulness but fails to capture the psychological depth of its source material. For all its visual craft, it’s a hollow, bewildering experience- a fog-shrouded journey never leading anywhere worth going. In short, ‘Return to Silent Hill’ isn’t one you’ll go back to.