Christophe Gans, Evie Jayne Templeton, Giula Pelagati, Hannah Emily Anderson, horror, Jeremy Irvine, Massachusetts, movies, Nicola Alexis, Pearse Egan, Return to Silent Hill, reviews, Robert Strange, Silent Hill
January 23, 2026
by Carla Hay
Directed by Christophe Gans
Culture Representation: Taking place in Massachusetts, the horror film “Return to Silent Hill” (based on the 2001 video game “Silent Hill 2”) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Asians and black people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A man has constant hallucinatory delusions because he cannot accept that his girlfriend is dead, and he imagines returning to a place called Silent Hill, where they had their courtship, but Silent Hill is now a desolate location filled with monsters.
Culture Audience: “Return to Silent Hill” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Silent Hill” franchise and don’t mind if a horror movie is boring and has a flimsy plot.
Repetitive and incoherent, the horror film “Return to Silent Hill” is yet another creatively bankrupt movie based on a video game. This turgid movie (about a grieving man in denial about the death of a loved one) has subpar visual effects and weak acting. And the ending is absolutely terrible.
Directed by Christophe Gans, “Return to Silent Hill” was co-written by Gans, William Josef Schneider and Sandra Vo-Anh. The movie is based on the video game “Silent Hill 2,” which was originally released in 2001 and had a remake in 2024. The “Silent Hill” video games, originally created by Team Silent at Konami Computer Entertainment, have also spawned other “Silent Hill” movies, and all of them have been critically panned flops: 2006’s “Silent Hill” (directed by Gans) and 2012’s “Silent Hill: Revelation” (directed by MJ Bassett).
“Return to Silent Hill” takes place in Massachusetts but was actually filmed in Germany and in the Serbian city of Belgrade. The movie begins by showing protagonist James Sunderland (played by Jeremy Irvine), who is a painter artist, driving on a road in his car during the day, when he swerves to avoid crashing into a very large truck. As his car skids on the road, it hits three suitcases that belong to heiress Mary Crane (played by Hannah Emily Anderson), who is waiting on the road for her bus ride. James and Mary are both in their 30s.
Clothes and other items spill out of the suitcases because of the impact of James’ car. James gets out of the car and makes an apology for the mess and helps Mary put the items back in the suitcases. Mary’s bus has arrived but can’t wait for her to finish getting her suitcases in order, so the bus leaves without her. James feels bad about this accident and offers to drive Mary where she needs to go.
Mary says she’s going to a town called Silent Hill, which is visible across a canyon near the road. Mary points out Silent Hill to James, as they start to have a mutual attraction during their conversation. Flashbacks later show that Mary told James that her widower father, who is now deceased, founded Silent Hill. The sunny sky suddenly turns dark and foreboding. Mary says it’s a “Silent Hill summer storm. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does …”
The movie then abruptly shows an image of Mary’s dead body sinking in outdoor water. The scene of James and Mary meeting is one of several flashback scenes in “Return to Silent Hill.” The movie is nothing but a repeat loop of one of these scenarios: (1) James having flashback memories of his time with Mary before she died; (2) James imagining that he’s experiencing terror in Silent Hill, where he goes to look for Mary in his delusional thinking that she’s still alive; and (3) James waking up from his hallucinations and having someone—such as his therapist, whose name is listed in the end credits only as M (played by Nicola Alexis)—telling him to stop imagining things and to face reality.
James goes back to look for Mary in Silent Hill because he found a letter from her saying, “Come back to our place. I need you. Mary.” Silent Hill is not the idyllic and charming town that existed during the courtship of James and Mary. Silent Town now resembles a foggy and desolate war zone. James is told that Silent Hill experienced a devastating fire, which is why the town is nearly abandoned.
When James is in this unpleasant version of Silent Hill, various chase scenes and horror scenarios occur with monsters such as a hulking brute named Pyramid Head (played Robert Strange) and a contortionist femme fatale named Spider Lady (played by Giula Pelagati), whose names describe what these creatures look like. A few dirty and disheveled humans are also lurking around, including a man named Eddie (played by Pearse Egan), whom James finds in an abandoned jail cell. The movie’s gore and kill scenes are bloody but not excessive.
James and Eddie find a girl named Laura (played by Evie Jayne Templeton), who’s about 11 or 12 years old, as she is hiding in the jail cell. Laura is later revealed to be connected in some way to Mary. Pyramid Head then appears and attacks James. And then, James is shown chasing Laura through a maze in a scene that’s an inferior imitation of the maze chase scene in 1980’s “The Shining.” These chase scenes often abruptly end with James waking up to “reality” and not wanting to stay in reality. And so, he goes back into being delusional again.
During all of these idiotic shenanigans, James interacts with women who look like Mary, but who are wearing wigs and different makeup. (Mary has long red hair.) James is too dimwitted to notice that these women’s faces and bodies are the same as Mary’s, until one of them has to point out the resemblance to him. Anderson has the roles of all of these Mary look-alikes, such as a Goth woman named Angela with jet-black hair, an outspoken woman named Maria with a blonde bob hairstyle, and a character called Moth Mary, who looks exactly what her name is.
This sloppily made and lazy movie does nothing to turn the video game and into an enjoyable cinematic experience. All of the characters have empty personalities. Many of the visual effects in “Return to Silent Hill” look tacky and very fake. Although the movie’s main monsters are played by real people and aren’t computer-generated imagery, they have the visual impact of walking through a haunted house attraction at an amusement park: They might get a few jump scares, but those scares are very fleeting.
The cast members’ performances aren’t very impressive, although Anderson makes a good effort in her portrayals of various characters. Irvine gives a performance that’s like watching someone sleepwalking. And it’s not just because James spends most of the movie in a hallucinatory state of mind. Irvine says James’ dialogue as if he knows he’s in a terrible movie and doesn’t want to be there. Irvine is British in real life and sometimes struggles to maintain his American accent in the movie.
Even though James doesn’t talk about how Mary died, there’s also no suspense about how she died because it’s shown in the first 15 minutes of the movie. Mary and James were an unmarried couple who broke up before she died. Flashback scenes show why the relationship between James and Mary ended. Mary’s death occurred an untold number of months before the events of “Return to Silent Hill” take place. It’s a slight departure from the “Silent 2” video game, which has James as a grieving widower.
“Return to Silent Hill” is worse than a video game. At least with a video game, a viewer can be interactive and have some control over how the story plays out. With a dreadfully dull and nonsensical junkpile movie like “Return to Silent Hill,” viewers who want to experience everything until the very end have no choice but to watch a pile-on of horror nonsense that isn’t scary but is definitely silly.
Cineverse released “Return to Silent Hill” on January 23, 2026.