Silence Would Be Better Than This

Box office figures notwithstanding, by its second week of release Silent Hill may find itself to be the most reviled American film since Gigli.

French director Christopher Gans (from a screenplay by Roger Avary, Pulp Fiction's unsung co-writer), has translated the eponymous videogame's paralyzing atmosphere of fog-soaked dread to the screen with the surrealist flair of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, fully avoiding the jump-scare lassitude American filmmakers have offered the genre. Narrative coherence is delightfully subservient to the abstract horrors of unimaginable nightmares-it may not make any sense, but, regardless of context, the sight of barbed wire eviscerating a woman via her vagina is a bit more unsettling than a cat providing a fake shock.

Silent Hill tells the story of the Da Silva family (Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, and Jodelle Ferland as the mother, father, and child, respectively), a happy unit disrupted by their nine-year-old daughter's hazardous affinity for sleepwalking (the opening scene finds her unconsciously attempting to hurl herself into a waterfall). Little Sharon has a habit of screaming the film's title during her midnight travels, and after a Google search or two, her mother, Rose, discovers that Silent Hill is the name of a West Virginian ghost town. Convinced that the only way to cure her daughter is to take her to the place that so provokes her, Rose abandons her husband and heads to hell. A car crash and one missing daughter later, Rose finds herself in an abandoned piece of Bible Belt paradise, complete with a fog so thick it would make Alain Resnais jealous. Then a siren sounds and the world goes dark.

From that point on, Silent Hill is a vaguely senseless orgy of the absurd, and the giddy excitement with which Gans tortures his heroine is contagious and never misogynistic. As she scampers and screams her way across the town's twisted landscape, she's hunted by an array of the most unsparingly horrid creatures this side of Fat Actress. They appear with little rhyme or reason and vanish with no narrative impact-they exist solely for themselves, and they are glorious. From the affectionately titled "Pyramid Head" (a charming goliath with a massive pyramid for a head who wields cinema's largest sword, tears flesh off the innocent, and secretes legions of man-eating cockroaches to seal the deal) to the nurses (blind women with ashen flesh for faces whose gaits suggest how Night of the Living Dead might have looked had it been directed by Bob Fosse), Silent Hill is a veritable funhouse of the obscene.

Gans placates those in need of narrative footholds with a half-cocked subplot chronicling Bean's search for his family, but this is a film that feeds off of detached horrors, and the coherence and levity that his appearances provide sabotages the atmosphere that Gans' abominations have worked so hard to cultivate. By the time the end rolls around, however, and humans are inevitably revealed to be the true demons in a bizarre morality-play-cum-witch-trial, those willing to surrender to Gans' warped approach will have forgiven the film's parade of senselessness and vacant performances, if only because of its sheer capacity to shake heads and slacken jaws. Silent Hill is an indelibly twisted refuge from the safety of American horror schlock-while most will be appalled, those who prefer Suspiria to When A Stranger Calls will find it a minor miracle.