A couple friends have generously offered to serve as temporary sherpas during my monthlong dark journey of the soul. Chris is uniquely qualified: he has a huge TV, 5.1 stereo, and a mid-market box of Shiraz. (Had. He had a mid-market box of Shiraz.)
Crimson Peak had yet to leak for torrenting (we would never…!), so I skimmed Google Play for something both visually arresting and with at least seven minutes of Sean Bean on screen.
When the film was released in 2006, there were only four Silent Hill video games, none of which I’ve ever played. But Konami was creating a lush*, freaky world that’s a little bit Centralia, Pa.**, a little bit whatever circle of hell is most applicable to a given character. Silent Hill is ostensibly an abandoned town located on top of an eternal underground mine fire…in West Virginia.
The town becomes a sort of seedy, tough-love holodeck, bending the fiber of reality to deliver whatever psychological horrors are most personal and effecting for the unwary tourist. But the object isn’t necessarily personal growth, and there’s a fair amount of death, dismemberment, and a lot of mythology (some of it Native American?)
It is most definitely my kind of place.
The movie gets it right in fits and starts
exhibit a
exhibit b
and is at its best when it keeps everything claustrophobic and shadowy. That lasts for about half, and then it becomes about large-scale religious fanaticism, and it loses its edge.
The plot borrow from the first game: A little girl with a sleep disorder slips out of the car near Silent Hill. Her adoptive mother goes in after her, and her adoptive father is kept out of the loop completely. He has to play buddy-cop to a rather inconsistent police detective, whose partner has also gone missing on The Hill.
We had a few questions, and none of them to do with faceless nurses or Pyramid Head: How long had the little girl (Sharon) lived with her adopted parents? And how long had those parents been married? because communication between them was terrible, with Rose (Radha Mitchell) giving Christopher (Bean) the slip, and Christopher subsequently freezing her debit card because he was against Rose’s trip to Silent Hill with their daughter… so really, not a very united parenting front. Even the preview makes it look like they’re already separated.
I did appreciate an overly long scene of Bean completely bypassing the FOIA process and scouring old police records for information about his new daughter (who at this point I’m assuming he’d only been parenting for three months, after she was left on his doorstep with a very minimalist note). Director Christophe Gans only gave us about four minutes of Bean fruitlessly scouring through file boxes; I could’ve watched him do it for the entirety of the film’s 125-minute runtime.
* very lush: its wiki is 2,112 articles and counting
** If we have a Chernobyl Diaries, how has the entire horror film industry slacked on getting a Centralia out there?
