Hannah Emily Anderson Archives

January 23, 2026

by Carla Hay

Jeremy Irvine in “Return to Silent Hill” (Photo by Aleksandar Letic/Cineverse)

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.

Hannah Emily Anderson in “Return to Silent Hill” (Photo by Aleksandar Letic/Cineverse)

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.

October 11, 2020

by Carla Hay

“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw”

Directed by Thomas Robert Lee

Culture Representation: Taking place in 1973 in an unnamed rural area in North America, the horror film “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” has an all-white cast representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A teenage girl has a mother who is suspected of being a witch and who goes to great lengths to hide her from the people in their town.

Culture Audience: “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” will appeal primarily to people who like atmospheric and suspenseful horror stories about the supernatural.

Catherine Walker in “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” (Photo courtesy of Epic Pictures)

“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” (written and directed by Thomas Robert Lee) is an effectively bleak and brooding film that doesn’t do anything groundbreaking in the horror genre. However, the movie serves up the right amount of eerie chills that should please horror fans who like stories about strange happenings in a small village that might or not be affected by witchcraft. “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” is about a community in 1973 that is stuck in a past century, but many of the film’s social themes—such as society privilege, discrimination against people who are considered “different,” and the right for a woman to choose when to have a child—are all relevant to today.

The beginning of “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” has text on screen explaining the background of the village that’s at the center of this movie’s story: In 1873, a group of families separated from the Church of Ireland and settled in an isolated part of North America. (The movie was actually filmed in the Canadian city of Calgary.) The settlers kept their traditional ways and shunned new inventions and technology.

In 1956, a phenomenon, which was later called “the eclipse” by the villagers, resulted in a plague that spread throughout the community. This pestilence caused soil to be poisoned and livestock to get sick or die. However, one farm that’s far from the other residences seems to be immune from this plague: the farm owned by Agatha Earnshaw, who secretly gave birth to a daughter named Audrey during the eclipse.

Agatha’s place is the only farm in the area where the crops and livestock are thriving, while the rest of the villagers are suffering from food shortages because of their diseased crops and ailing farm animals. Because of Agatha’s uncommon fortune in not being affected by the plague and her abundance of food, people suspect that she is a witch. The village’s resentment against her also increases because she refuses to sell or trade any of her overflowing stock of food.

That’s what happens in the opening scene of the film, which takes place in 1973, when a man named Lochlan Bell (played by Tom Carey) makes an unannounced visit to Agatha’s farm and begs her to trade what he has for some food. He tells Agatha that he has a family to feed, but she stubbornly refuses to sell or trade any food to him. As a dejected Lochlan walks away, Audrey, who is 17, comes out of hiding and asks Agatha who that man was. Agatha replies that the man is a “villain” who “steals girls like you” and “that’s why they can never know about you.”

Agatha has gone to great lengths to hide that Audrey exists and won’t leave Audrey by herself. When Agatha travels into town by carriage, Audrey is hidden in the carriage’s wooden trunk. Audrey doesn’t know any other life, but as she gets older, she begins to find out that not everything her mother tells her is true.

One day, Agatha takes the carriage in town and happens to pass by a funeral for a boy named Liam Dwyer, who recently died under mysterious circumstances: He suddenly stopped breathing. Liam’s grieving parents are Colin Dwyer (played by Jared Abrahamson) and Bridget Dwyer (played by Hannah Emily Anderson), and the funeral service is being conducted by Colin’s compassionate pastor father Seamus Dwyer (played by Sean McGinley). Liam, who is never seen in the movie, was Colin and Bridget’s only child.

Colin sees Agatha passing by with her carriage full of food and becomes so offended that he lashes out at her. He thinks that Agatha is flaunting her abundance of food in front of the starving villagers, and he’s particularly insulted that she’s doing it at the funeral of his son. Agatha protests and says she didn’t know about the funeral, but Colin gets so angry that he hits Agatha and accuses her of being a witch. Seamus calms Colin down and makes a gentlemanly attempt to protect her. A visibly shaken Agatha leaves the scene.

Hidden inside the trunk, Audrey hears everything that happened. And based on the conversation she has with her mother later, it’s clear that although Audrey was aware that Agatha was not well-liked by the villagers, it has now reached a level of violence that alarms Audrey, who is starting to wonder if what the villagers are saying is true. Agatha tries to dismiss her fears and says that Audrey should trust her, not the villagers.

Lochlan, Colin, Bridget and Seamus all become entangled in Audrey and Agatha’s world in some way. There is also a married couple named Deirdre Buckley (played by Geraldine O’Rawe) and Bernard Buckley (played by Don McKellar) who are affected by many of the occurrences in this story. It’s enough to say that an act of revenge sets off a series of events revealing the true natures of Agatha and Audrey.

During all of the turmoil that happens, Bridget finds out that she’s pregnant, but she is convinced that something is wrong with the baby. She begins acting strangely, such as one night when Colin finds Bridget eating something bloody outside in their field. Bridget is so disturbed by how the pregnancy is making her act and feel that she tells Colin that she wants to terminate the pregnancy. Colin thinks she’s crazy for not wanting to have the child, and he orders her to have the baby, no matter how she feels.

“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw,” which features terrific cinematography by Nick Thomas, has a sepia-toned atmosphere that eerily represents the otherworldly environment of a community living in a past century, conjuring up the look of a photograph from the 1870s. The brown-ish look of the film also representing the ongoing desolation of a community that has a mostly barren landscape but the villagers refuse to go anywhere else, even though their environment seems to be cursed. They are stuck in the past in more ways than one.

This oppressive atmosphere has a great deal to do with what ends up happening in the story, which writer/director Lee has crafted with a slow-burn pace that might be a little too slow for some viewers, but the tone is just right in portraying a community that is far removed from a fast-paced urban life. The movie gradually unpeels the layers of the mother/daughter relationship between Agatha and Audrey and reveals that there’s more to Audrey and Agatha’s story than what it initially appears to be in the beginning of the movie.

All of the actors do a fine job in their roles. But as the title character, Reynolds has the biggest responsibility in doing a convincing portrayal of Audrey’s complexities. It’s an impressive feature-film debut from Reynolds, who skillfully portrays the innocence of an overprotected child and the mystery of someone whom her mother wants to keep a secret. With its intriguing story, “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” has plenty of creepy and gruesome images, along with subtle commentary about feminine power and oppression, that make it an above-average horror film.

Epic Pictures released “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” in select U.S. cinemas, digital on VOD on October 2, 2020. The movie’s Blu-ray and DVD release date is on October 20, 2020.

Tag: Hannah Emily Anderson

Review: ‘Return to Silent Hill,’ starring Jeremy Irvine and Hannah Emily Anderson

Review: ‘The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw,’ starring Jessica Reynolds, Catherine Walker, Jared Abrahamson, Hannah Emily Anderson, Geraldine O’Rawe, Don McKellar and Sean McGinley