film | A town without pretty

Rose (Pitch Black's Radha Mitchell), the intrepid heroine of SILENT HILL, probably won't be winning many mother-of-the-year awards anytime soon. Not only do she and her husband (Lord of the Rings' Sean Bean) opt to live in a house atop a jeopardous cliff while caring for a nightmare-afflicted daughter (Jodelle Ferland) who's prone to outdoors sleepwalking, but when the wee somnambulist starts murmuring about the titular (and fictional) West Virginian haunted hamlet — where, Rose learns, toxic coal fires have blazed underground for decades — Rose's curious reaction is to: A) shun psychological help (Tom Cruise would be proud!); B) hightail it there with the kid in the middle of the night; C) ignore her hubby's sensible phone pleas to return home; and D) knowingly endanger her young by literally crashing into the town while speeding away from a motorcycle cop (Laurie Holden) who's merely trying to warn her that THIS ROUTE MIGHT NOT BE THE BEST IDEA.

Great, folks. Just great. We're maybe 15 minutes into this Playstation-based crud, and the main character's already lost me.

Long story short: The girl goes missing, and Rose spends the rest of the film frantically searching for her amidst the ashy haze of Silent Hill, which ain't too easy given that the place is abandoned save for a cult of burn-the-witch religious zealots who shuffle around making ominously kooky pronouncements ("Into the fire she swallowed their hate") when they're not excitedly roasting godless interlopers on a spit. Oh, and there are also vaguely humanoid creatures leftover from Aphex Twin music videos and/or the cinematic oeuvre of Clive Barker that appear every time strange air-raid sirens trigger the quietly uneasy locale's sudden supernatural transformation into an unsettlingly hellish netherworld. This happens roughly once every half-hour, as if to remind audiences who've grown lethargic from Rose's sluggish sleuthing that they are, in fact, watching something that purports to be a horror flick.

Eventually, Silent Hill stumbles through the backstory of its twisted demonology via a chunk of oh-come-on exposition dispensed by an eerily adult-mannered child (see The Sixth Sense or The Others or The Ring or Hide and Seek — it's getting old), and it's capped off by an overdue climax that's a little bit Carrie, a little bit The Crucible, and a whole lot "Is That All There Is?" originally performed by Miss Peggy Lee. French director Christophe Gans previously helmed the baroque action extravaganza Brotherhood of the Wolf, a visually striking movie that earned him more than a few admirers, but it's hard to imagine anybody other than lifetime Fangoria subscribers screaming the praises of Silent Hill aloud. D