Adapted from the PlayStation game of the same name, this movie attempts to capture the mystery and the spooky atmosphere of a survival horror video game.

Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Chris (Sean Bean) have an adopted daughter, Sharon, who has some concerning sleepwalking dreams. Rose decides (against Chris’ wishes) to take Sharon to a small town called Silent Hill in an attempt get to the bottom of Sharon’s past.

After their vehicle crashes, Rose wakes up to find Sharon is gone. Rose searches the town and eventually returns to the car where she finds Cybil, a motorcycle cop who followed their vehicle to Silent Hill. Upon discovering the road back is completely gone, Rose and Cybil explore the town in search of Rose and another way out. They find unspeakable horrors from a cult that had taken over the town.

As the movie progresses, Chris goes looking for Rose and Sharon, but finds the empty ghost town of Silent Hill, posing the question: where have they gone?

What the movie does really well is the tension from the surroundings. All of the backgrounds and sets are very unsettling. The music and ambient sound will creep you out regularly. This creates the perfect environment for, say, a faceless nurse creature to stalk towards our hero characters and make you, the viewer, shit your pants.

Where it kind of falls flat is all the time spent trying to explain what is going on, and it would have been a great area to do more with less.

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