Review: Silent Hill: Revelation

Sean Bean and his daughter Adelaide Clemens have moved towns several times over the last 6 years for reasons she doesn’t quite understand. However, she’s about to find out, as private detective Martin Donovan catches hold of her and explains that he has been hired to find her. He knows her real name, and says that she is supposed to come to a place called Silent Hill. Spooked, Clemens and new school chum Kit Harington (in his film debut) head home from school to see her dad, only to find that he is gone, and the words ‘Come to Silent Hill’ are written in blood on the walls. So it’s off to Silent Hill they go, a dreamscape place where demons and monsters, and insane Malcolm McDowell live. An unrecognisable Carrie-Ann Moss turns up as the chief villainess of the piece, whilst Deborah Kara Unger and Radha Mitchell briefly reprise their roles from the first film.

 

Although I’m not really a gamer (certainly haven’t played anything in about a decade at least), I nearly took a liking to the film adaptation of “Silent Hill”, and this 2012 sequel from writer-director Michael J. Bassett (the similarly OK “Solomon Kane” and the genuinely underrated “Wilderness”) isn’t so inferior as to require a lesser rating. You could do a helluva lot worse in the video game adaptation subgenre than these atmospheric, visually pleasing flicks, even if neither quite makes it into ‘good movie’ territory. Bloody close both times, though.

 

We don’t get off to a terribly auspicious start here. Although we get what looks like a Cenobite version of a merry-go-round, it’s followed up with one of cinema’s oldest clichés. Even more annoying than the ‘It was just a dream’ cliché, is the ‘It was just a dream…no wait, it wasn’t!...or maybe it was, Haha!’ cliché. I hate that shit right there. Meanwhile, Radha Mitchell returns in ghostly (i.e. Contrived) form to pretty much set up the film’s plot, unnecessarily I might add, in a scene set between the events of the first film and the beginning of this film’s plot. Confused? Yeah. However, I did like the casting of perennial pervert Martin Donovan as a character who is really only creepy and suspicious because he’s played by Donovan, and who may just be a red herring.

 

Like the first film, this is a good-looking, fog-enveloped nightmare of a film. Meanwhile, aside from the unnecessary involvement from Mitchell, the set-up to this actually isn’t uninteresting. It might remind you a little of an “Elm St.” sequel as the survivors of the previous film realise they can’t quite escape the nightmare. As with last time, there’s lots of cool, creepy imagery, and this one’s actually surprisingly gory at times too (You’ll get faint “Hellraiser” echoes at times). Lead actress and Michelle Williams doppelganger Adelaide Clemens (If you’re an Aussie, why would you name your child after one of our own states? Poor thing!) is pretty damn good in the lead role, easily the best actor in the entire film. A pre-“Game of Thrones” Kit Harington proves here that he knows nothing about American accents, though to be fair Sean Bean does about as good a job of it himself. Bean, by the way, has almost as much of an expository function in this film as does Mitchell. He’s just there to fill in the necessary narrative gaps and provide in his final scene the most shameless set-up for a second sequel that I’ve ever seen. Malcolm McDowell doesn’t do what I’d consider GOOD acting here, but he’s having a ball and makes for an amusing loon. Carrie-Ann Moss is no Alice Krige, however, by a long stretch.

 

What really bothered me about the film is the same main flaw the original had: After a while it becomes a whole lot of walking around, so that the creepy visuals and atmosphere are the chief pleasures, and after a while that sees the film lose you a bit. It’s the same ‘ol thing with a predominantly new cast. Not bad, not good, it has much more visual imagination than narrative imagination. That carries it somewhat, and the gore helps too.

 

The atmosphere and creepy visuals kept me more interested in this than I was expecting. Lead actress Adelaide Clemens impresses, and the film’s a lot better than it has any right to be. I mean, it’s not “Doom”, OK? That counts for something doesn’t it? Just shy of a recommendation, however. 

 

Rating: C+