By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Beyond SILENT HILL
Silent Hill
Dir. Christopher Gans. 2006. R. 120mins. Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Alice Krige.
Say this for Silent Hill: the movie looks just like the game it’s based on. The same yellow fogs, the same faceless monsters lumbering along dark hallways, the same dead-eyed characters who blunder into peril, searching alone for loved ones. You know those dead video game eyes: that one-percent-less-than-lifelike facial expression displayed by even the most ingeniously rendered video game characters. The kind of eyes you’ll get while trying to get through two hours of this movie.
Slow and scare-free, Silent Hill nonetheless has a gloomy beauty—if you like looking at photography books of ruined industrial towns, peeling paint and rusty stairwells. There’s not much story here: For reasons never made clear, the heroine, Rose (Radha Mitchell) drives her weird little girl Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) who is adopted, from Ohio to the town of Silent Hill, West Virginia.
Warned off by Rose’s estranged husband (he’s googled SILENT HILL: the entries all came up HAUNTED) and local police, mother and daughter soon run afoul of Silent Hill’s strange powers. It’s located atop a coal mine which frequently explodes, and despite a steady precipitation of coal dust and ash, no one ever coughs or wheezes, not even the crazed religious cult that chases Rose as she chases her runaway daughter. Far too late in the story, Rose observes that in Silent Hill, “something terrible happened.”
That’s the funniest line in an awfully grim film.
One interesting note on it, though:
Screenwriter Roger Avary got the idea for the movie’s version of Silent Hill from the coal town turned ghost town Centralia, Pennsylvania. Beneath it, a coal fire has been burning since 1963.
The former town of Centralia has been the subject of magazine stories in Harper’s (February 2004) and Esquire (August 1999)
Sony’s Silent Hill website has more on the movie, Avary and the town.
Ugo has extensive coverage here.
http://silenthill.ugo.com/features/realsilenthill/default.asp
Sony’s SILENT HILL site
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/silenthill/index.html
They also link to a history of Centralia
http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centralia.htm
is silent hill a real place?