Rating: ****.5 ( 4 and a half out of 5)
Year: 2006

Plot: A little girl’s somnambulistic adventures make mom (Radha Mitchell) fearful and frantic. She decides to take her daughter to the town she mentions while in her trances: Silent Hill. They do so against the advice of the locals, the commands of the police, and without the husband’s knowledge. Mom and daughter are separated upon arrival, and the rest of the movie is about her search to find her child. Is Rose (the mother) experiencing some sort of psychotic episode, or does the town of Silent Hill possess a demonic power to twists the nature of reality which it uses to force new-comers to hear it’s terrible tale? Here’s a hint, it’s the latter.

Review: Probably the best movie to come from a video game. The set design, color schemes, monster effects, pacing, sound design, and religious overtones combine for a permeating sense of creepy apprehension. The movie itself develops in much the same way that a video game would, with tasks that enable the pursuit of more advanced goals, the progressive release of background exposition, and even a cut sequence towards the end that feels very much like an end-of-the-game reward video. The movie makes use of a clever mechanism that allows the town to transition every 15 minutes or so between a simply creepy, off-putting ghost town and an out-and-out hell dimension. The protagonist’s journeys into the depths of that hell build to a panting crescendo that release the viewer at just the right moment. This is a movie I watch year after year.