Return to Silent Hill, 2026

Review of the horror film “Return to Silent Hill” — the biggest disappointment for gamers in 2026

Christophe Gans returned after 20 years and shot the same thing again.

Return to Silent Hill, the new film by Christophe Gans, is coming to theaters, bringing the cult classic Silent Hill 2 to the big screen. Twenty years ago, the director already built the architecture of the foggy town in Silent Hill, and many people liked the film adaptation, so the new film inspired timid hope. Let's try to figure out below whether the expectations were justified.

Artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) is struggling to cope with his breakup with his girlfriend, Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson), which is why he is seeing a psychiatrist and often seeks refuge from reality at the bottom of a bottle. Everything changes when he finds a note from Mary inviting him to Silent Hill, where they first met. However, over the years, the Massachusetts resort has turned into a ghost town, a shadow of its former self. Once a sunny and joyful place, it now resembles hell on earth, where James must confront the terrible truth from his past.

Christophe Gans had been dreaming of adapting Silent Hill 2 for film practically since the game's release in 2001: in interviews, he repeatedly admitted that he wanted to make the sequel, but understood that James Sunderland's personal story might be difficult to understand without knowledge of Silent Hill itself. Therefore, he ultimately decided to adapt the first game in the franchise first, which he did in 2006. Even in the first film, it was clear that the director had his own vision of the cult video game town: in Gunn's version, much more attention was paid to the religious aspect, while the psychology of the characters was almost completely pushed into the background. The visuals, in turn, were heavily focused on pain and cruelty: yes, the original 1999 Silent Hill also told a rather gruesome story involving burning alive, physical and psychological abuse, and other aspects, but in the game, it was all presented with due respect. Gunn, on the other hand, unabashedly filled the screen with gallons of blood, dismembered bodies, and flayed skin, which not everyone liked. Still, the director had his own vision of Silent Hill, which he decided to preserve in the sequel.

Return to Silent Hill uses techniques familiar from the previous film: the nightmarish reality once again appears as a creation of metal, rust, and flame, inhabited by grotesque monsters, among which a special place is occupied by swarming cockroaches with human faces and Lying Figures, creatures whose hands are tied to their bodies and whose chests have gaping holes that spew acid. In this respect, the film really looks like a declared return to familiar places by completely preserving the aesthetics of the previous picture.

James, like Rose in the first part, wanders between four Silent Hills: foggy, nightmarish, real, and a city from the past. The place of slow-burning, unhurried horror is taken by endless scenes of persecution by hordes of cockroaches and other monsters, and the main tools of fear are screamers and grotesque violence. There is plenty of both, as well as attention to the local religion. At the same time, the innovations are poorly developed: the goals of the cult remain a mystery, the search for a bride is frankly stagnating, the monsters have lost their inherent symbolism, and the screamers are made in the tradition of early 2000s films. All this looks like a desperate attempt to tie the stories of the two Ganov films together — even though the first and second games had almost nothing in common, except for the setting and some of the principles of how the world works.

However, there is one big “but”: the Silent Hill depicted on screen is not the same as before. Literally: in the 2006 film, it was reported that the town was located in West Virginia, while in “The Return,” it is in Massachusetts. The first film adaptation was based on the real-life town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where underground fires have been raging since 1962, causing the town to be abandoned. This location allowed for the transformation of some introductory scenes—for example, the snow falling in the middle of summer, which surprised the game's protagonist, was replaced by ash. Ashes are also present in the sequel, but there is no sign of an underground fire. Nor are there any other elements that led to the fall of Silent Hill, but the new city in another state still retains the same conventions, right down to the sound of sirens. Because of this, Silent Hill on screen looks almost like a backdrop that has lost its charm, where the changing architecture adapted to each unfortunate visitor.

If you ignore the repetition of techniques from the 2006 film, which is not so easy to do, the picture begins to be marred by other problems of varying degrees of severity — from the numerous flashbacks, which make up almost half of The Return, to the strange character development. The latter is surprising not even as an adaptation of characters that fans have known and loved for a quarter of a century, but in itself: Eddie, one of the few key characters in Silent Hill 2, has completely lost his personal arc and appears in the film for no more than five minutes. As in the first Silent Hill, Gahan is much more interested in female characters, so James constantly encounters five heroines: Mary, Maria, Angela (Yves McLean), Laura (Ivy Templeton), and M (Nicola Alexis) — a psychologist working with James' difficult condition. The problem is that their characters are simplified to the extreme, and the central twist of the game, which once shocked gamers, is reduced to a short scene that is almost completely devoid of emotional involvement for the viewer.

It is evident that Gan had indeed conceived the film back in 2001. The fact is that Silent Hill 2 was criticized upon its release for straying significantly from the formula of the first installment, removing almost all of the esoteric elements and emphasizing the psychological aspects of the situation. Gan decided to “fix” this and shot his own version of the story, bringing back everything that was “missing” from it. It doesn't matter that over the years, the second game has come to be recognized as the best in the series, precisely because it didn't try to scare people with the usual tricks, but instead focused on the darkness within the human mind. The director is clearly still more interested in creating grotesque violence and sinister cults than delving into the human mind. It probably would have worked if the film had been released 20 years ago, but now, alas, it all looks like a misunderstanding that should be forgotten immediately after viewing.

This article was sponsored by Hollywood Hills Suites