Return to Silent Hill is finally out, and all our fears have materialized, but not in a good way. This reimagining of Silent Hill 2 misunderstands everything that made the original an all-timer, so let’s look into its most egregious crimes.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2’s greatness stems from its uniquely bold take on making a sequel. After the events of the original game, the titular town is free of the evil cult channeling its power to do its evil bidding. A lesser sequel would’ve come up with a newer, stronger cult to harass the heroes, but instead, the town gained an agency of its own, resulting in the rare sequel that trades the usual scope increase for the chance to tell a more personal, emotional, and harrowing tale.
In SH2, the town is a place of great intangible power that, for reasons completely alien to us, draws people in to then mess with their heads in horrifying ways. The developers had the fantastic idea of showing the town not as a necessarily evil place, but rather as an entity capable of altering the fiber of reality in the eyes of the beholder.
When not being controlled by an evil cult, an entity of unknown ambitions that taunts people with their deepest-seated emotions makes for a much more interesting villain. Sadly, Return to Silent Hill made the exact mistake the game avoided. This time, the fancy new cult does little more than set the events in motion, but they’re still there to take the agency of our main characters and thus make this story, originally a character drama, much less interesting.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand Laura
A very important aspect of Silent Hill 2 is the ambiguity regarding the town’s ambitions. What makes it even more interesting is that, despite everything, we learn Silent Hill isn’t evil. The proof that we know it’s not evil is Laura, the little girl. Laura is never in danger. You’d expect to have to save the little girl from a monster at some point. Nope. She’s always ok. The monsters don’t even exist in the same plane as Laura, and it’s possible that the town even conjures pizza to keep her comfy and vibing.
You can even, perhaps, see Silent Hill as an inherently good place if you see Laura’s presence as another way to redeem James. In the movie, Laura isn’t a real person, but rather one of Silent Hill’s creations. This simplification removes an entire layer of meaning from the story.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand James
Silent Hill 2 came out at a time when you just didn’t expect to get emotional baggage out of a game that would take players decades to unpack. It’s a game unique in that sense, as it puts you in the shoes of a complex character no other game would, and has you judging his value as a human being through little and possibly contaminated evidence.
James killed his wife, a deed he himself believes he committed out of selfishness, and is forever haunted by remorse. Jeremy Irvine, who portrayed James in the movie, does a good job of showing his suffering throughout, but then we learn the reason for his grief is a completely different, and incomparably less serious one.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand Mary
The game’s final obstacle isn’t a big monster, but the final confrontation between James and Maria, the sexier, healthier version of his wife that the town had created for him. James rejects her, arguably proving he never killed Mary out of wanting something else. In the movie, we learn James never decided to kill Mary. It was Mary herself who begged James to kill her to end her suffering. The reason for his grief? He felt sorry for supposedly having abandoned her, even though he was actually trying to get her to leave the cult that was slowly killing her.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand Pyramid Head
Pyramid Head is the embodiment of James’ guilt. A hulking figure that James powerlessly witnesses murdering women. He somehow learns this rather early on in the movie, and, instead of defeating Pyramid Head, he mentally controls it to kill off Maria in the most gruesome way possible.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand Maria
Much like the town, we don’t know if Maria is good or evil, but we know she’s real. James just deciding to murder her because she’s not Mary is bonkers, and makes him the sort of villain the original story—and most of the movie—kind of showed you he never was.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand the emotional impact of a fake beard
You might’ve already seen this getting memed on social media. I wouldn’t have cared much for the fact that they used an obviously fake beard for one scene if that scene weren’t the emotional climax of the movie. What an absolutely jarring choice that inevitably tarnished both the tone of the movie and the actors’ otherwise competent performances.
Return to Silent Hill doesn’t understand Silent Hill endings
Silent Hill 2 has various serious endings, all of them great, all of them sad. The movie could’ve just picked one of them and called it a day. It seemingly does, going for the darkest one, where James ends his life. That’s an incredibly bleak ending, not necessarily the note I’d need such an already sad story to end on, but a faithful one I’d have accepted. Then, James wakes up in the moments right before meeting Mary for the first time, only now with the knowledge that Silent Hill is unequivocally a bad time, so the two drive away from the town.
At best, that happy ending would’ve been a cowardly copout as is, but it gets worse. As the screen fades to black, a very Silent Hill-esque noise plays, suggesting James and Mary won’t have their happy ending after all, as they’re likely trapped in a pocket dimension or some evil loop. It feels like they were cramming a bunch of classic Silent Hill alternative endings in one ending, which is bizarre in a bad, albeit hilarious, way.
The only dumber ending I could’ve imagined would be having the car ride into the sunset, then panning to some sign suggesting they’re heading to Raccoon City.
