‘Return to Silent Hill’ Review: Christophe Gans’s Belated Sequel Gets Lost in the Fog of Lackluster Video Game Movies [C-]

Fans of Silent Hill—legendary Japanese game developer Konami’s landmark psychological horror series (typically) about the terrors lurking within a quiet, Midwestern American hamlet—have had a good couple of years. Silent Hill f, the first new mainline game in the franchise in 13 years, was released in September 2025 to a largely positive reception. The year prior, a full-fledged remake of Silent Hill 2 received effusive praise, impressively upgrading the watershed 2001 survival horror game and acting as the first substantial piece of Silent Hill media after the series had lain dormant for years.

Since everything old is new again and the collective Silent Hill fandom still has that classic sequel fresh on the brain, there seems to be no better time for a faithful film adaptation of the title, especially from the director of the first Silent Hill film, released in 2006, Christophe Gans. Gans’s original film was a critical bomb and moderately blasphemous among fans for the ways it carelessly remixed in-universe lore and iconography into a studio horror blockbuster (all this is doubly true for the non-Gans-directed sequel, Silent Hill: Revelations 3D), but its accurately atmospheric tone and impressive production design have kept it in the cult-film consciousness in the years since.

For Return to Silent Hill, Gans simplifies matters. He and co-writers Sandra Vo-Anh and William Josef Schneider stay (sort of) true to the isolated story of Silent Hill 2: James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) receives a mysterious letter from his deceased wife Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), beckoning him back to their beloved backwater village of Silent Hill, where she claims to be waiting for him. It doesn’t take long for James to realize that Silent Hill isn’t what it used to be. The town is seemingly abandoned and blanketed in fog; monsters prowl the streets; and, when a siren sounds, the town slips into a decrepit alternate reality where a hulking figure called Pyramid Head (Robert Strange, credited as Red Pyramid) often looms over James with a massive blade.

Silent Hill devotees will be prepared for where the story goes from here—though maybe not for the way the film undermines its harrowing core. As the town continues to decay and grow more dangerous around James, we’re meant to wonder how much of this is him slipping into the darkest recesses of his own anguished psyche. James is a fascinating character in the game: ostensibly kind and benevolent, yet plagued by an undercurrent of torment that slowly seeps out over the course of his journey. James in Gans’s film is far more one-note, with key elements of his character sanitized and softened to give the script a cleaner emotional bent. Irvine does what he can with a role whose darker complications have been largely neutered, but he’s left mostly hiding, running, screaming, and engaging in stiff interactions with other characters. Game enthusiasts may take umbrage with the loss of James’s iconic parted blonde hair; movie fans will more resent that he doesn’t feel like a particularly knowable character at all.

That broad problem encompasses most of Return to Silent Hill, where Gans appears to have learned the wrong lessons from his first film. The ironic conundrum here is that, in contrast to earlier criticisms, the movie is too devoted to cramming in aspects of its roughly six-hour source material into a 100-minute runtime—and even then, the changes that are made feel misguided and unnecessary. There are so many obligatory beats of incident stuffed into Return to Silent Hill that it’s easy to imagine viewers unfamiliar with the game sitting aghast at the incoherence with which the film lurches from one plot beat to the next. James’s movement from one recognizable character or location to another reads less like the natural progression of a surreal story and more like a checklist being dutifully completed.

Those other characters are sanded down much like James himself, either stripped of the importance they once held or reduced to vessels that baldly represent their themes. It’s difficult to explain without spoiling key elements why Anderson plays both James’s wife Mary and Maria, the strange, flirtatious woman he meets midway through his journey, but it speaks to an overarching compulsion to eliminate ambiguity. It’s even harder to justify why Anderson also portrays Angela, another woman James encounters periodically, who is battling demons of her own. Again, this points to the ways Gans reworks specific ideas from the source text to fit more neatly within the confines of a feature film—typically to the story’s detriment.

One might hope that some of the residual sense of tone and worldbuilding Gans once brought to the franchise would carry over, but Return to Silent Hill feels cheaper than what was produced two decades ago. With an estimated $50 million budget, Silent Hill created a tactile world of real locations and sets that meaningfully brought the town to life in live-action. Return to Silent Hill, by contrast, was reportedly made for around $23 million—and, quite frankly, it shows. The town looks less intricate and less authentic, with obvious digital backdrops and frequent bouts of shoddy visual effects that comprise environmental details and the film’s creatures, like the straightjacket-skinned demons or the faceless nurses, none of which ever carry the weight that you may expect. Even the costuming feels budget-conscious; it’s debatable whether Anderson’s wigs across her multiple roles are meant to look quite so tacky and artificial, but they don’t work either way.

There are pockets of the runtime where you can feel Gans’s genuine fandom breaking through. He initially spent years courting Konami to secure the film rights, and his admiration for the series surfaces in some of the production’s stronger design choices. A sequence in which James runs through an apartment building and comes face-to-face with a genuinely intimidating Pyramid Head stands as the film’s high point, briefly capturing the singular hellfire terror that defines Silent Hill at its best. Likewise, quieter moments of James simply wandering through the town’s ghostly gray fog recall the ambient eeriness the setting can evoke. Also welcome is the return of the series’s regular composer, Akira Yamaoka, who adds a more credible touch with the film’s familiar melodic piano motifs within the score.

Still, Return to Silent Hill never captures the smothering, oppressive dread of the game, mainly because it’s a property with a premise built on immersion. Film adaptations naturally have to approach that differently. The problem is that Return never finds the right balance of modification in any direction—between devotion and reinvention, abstraction and clarity, desolation and solace. The game makes you feel emotionally and viscerally exhausted. The film just leaves you drained after seeing yet another video game property treated so haphazardly.

Grade: C-

Return to Silent Hill will be released theatrically in the United States by Cineverse and Iconic Events Releasing on January 23.