Brought to you by OBS staff member Rose

Name: Silent Hill
Rated: R
Running Time: 125 minutes

Director: Christophe Gans

Synopsis
When a mothers seeks answers about her adoptive daughter’s sleepwalking episodes that threaten the poor child’s life, Rose (Radha Mitchell) is lead to Silent Hill, the town her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) keeps screaming out. After attracting the attention of a motorcycle cop, Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden), Rose crashes in the abandoned outskirts of and knocked unconscious. When she wakes, Sharon is missing and falling ashes encasing the town. Now in search of her daughter, Rose must experience bizarre alternate reality shifts, mysterious terrifying creatures and the most dangerous of all, the towns people.

Review
Based on the video game of the same name, Silent Hill is horror at its finest. Having never played the game, I was unfamiliar with the storyline; I believe this was to my advantage, for I had not formed any expectations going in.

I became a fan of Radha Mitchell after seeing this film because I found her to be a genuinely good actress. Even though I had seen Pitch Black, she still did not really make an impression till now. Sean Bean who plays her husband, had such a minute role, he’s not worth even speaking of.

Now, getting to the good stuff, the horror. Most monsters were not CGI but rather real people in a costume, which lent it more realism and was very affecting. Pyramid head (in the video game, the pyramid shaped helm was designed to create an iconography of ‘pain’) was the scariest with his humungous floor-scraping knife. The scalpel-wielding, convulsive nurses with their clickety-click possessed movement was also creepy. I do not scare easily, for I have been watching horror films since I was too young to even be watching them, so it takes a lot. This movie scared the bejesus out of me. Every time that horn blew to signal a change of realities within the town, warning of impending doom, my skin crawled.

Silent Hill has joined the ranks as one of the top 5 scary movies I’ve seen. If you have never seen this film and your a horror buff, your missing out.

Rating: 9.5/10 stars