“Silent Hill” (2006): Inimitable and Unsurpassed. Film Review.

Oh, this “Silent Hill”. This movie has been my passion since I was a kid, when we were renting DVDs. And I watched it countless times, and every time I was riveted to the screen like for the first time.

How is it that 17 years have passed since its release and it still has no equal? Perhaps it’s one of the extremely rare films that has declared its style at once and at such a high level that no one else can still reach them. Though, of course, the credit should go to the 1999 game rather than the film in the first place, but then again, it too could easily have been ruined and left to gather dust on the shelf with other embarrassing screen adaptations.

Most importantly, “Silent Hill” does give food for thought. There are a lot of ideas here: about the pain that cannot be simply hidden away, because it will still burst out, about the duality of the concepts of God and the Devil (the Devil, in fact, is also God for those whose suffering finds no help anywhere else), about criticizing religion and fanaticism, and about strong women, in the end, because they rule everything in the world of the film.

And as for the aesthetics of the film, I don’t even have anything to say. You know it all yourself: it is unique and breathtakingly terrifying, and it will surely stick in your memory forever. But maybe you didn’t know that most of the frightening characters are only partly made with graphics, and the overwhelming majority are dressed in costumes. Perhaps it is this unprecedented plasticity of the actors that makes what happens so convincing and suggestive.

And almost one last thing. I had an idea (but I’m not sure it was originally mine and I didn’t overhear it somewhere) that the Silent Hill universe created by the Japanese game developers is nothing more than the result of digesting a collective trauma at the country level, caused, of course, by the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which really was commensurate with the local apocalypse. How about this?

And by the way, why didn’t Rose and Sharon ever return to “objective reality”? What’s your guess? It seems to me to be a metaphorical statement about the fact that a person who has been traumatized and has found salvation for themselves can never live in the world as it was before.