'Return to Silent Hill' Review: A Hellish Nightmare Sequel Lacking Any Soul
- Shauna Bushe
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
By Shauna Bushe - January 26, 2026
Twenty years after his first trip into the fog, director Christophe Gans (Silent Hill) returns to the town that largely defined his career, strengthening his status as a director skilled of visually stunning, niche genre adaptions. Silent Hill became his most recognized work, largely because of his deep, personal dedication to the source material and his ability to translate its atmospheric horror into a unique cinematic language. In Return to Silent Hill, Gans attempts to translate the most beloved entry in the gaming franchise “Silent Hill 2” into a modern cinematic fever dream. While the film is a stellar effort in production design, it unfortunately treats its psychological source material like a disposable checklist rather than an attached story.
What is 'Return to Silent Hill' about?
Return to Silent Hill centres on a grieving man, James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), a broken man lured back to the fog-choked town after receiving a letter from his lost love Mary. As he wanders through shifting streets and warped interiors, Silent Hill reshapes itself around his guilt and grief, turning his memories into threats, his subconscious into monsters and environments into psychological traps. As James searches for Mary, these manifestations force him to confront buried truths, whilst the town itself feeds on his remorse blurring the lines between punishment and redemption.
What follows is a tale that falters by implicating itself, opting for a more “Hollywood” conspiracy angle. Tying Marys fate back to the town’s cult lore, the film strips James of his personal concern. Instead of a man confronting his own hidden demons, we are fed a protagonist who mirrors a tourist in a haunted house. The pacing is chopped, rushing through Woodside Apartments and the Rosewater Park so quickly that the supporting characters, specifically the tragic Angela Orosco (Eve Macklin) feels more like a cameo rather than an essential cog in James’ psyche.
A Visual Love Letter
From the opening shot of James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) staring into a filth-streaked mirror, it is clear Gans understands the aesthetic of dread, the film excels when it lets the environment do the talking. That visual power arrives in the transitions to the “other world”, where reality peels away to reveal an architecture of decay. Within its layers of deterioration are the monstrous manifestations made physical for discomfort through James’ internal grief. Pyramid Head’s presence is defined by how his great knife scrapes against concrete, exhibiting an auditory anchor to his scenes, emphasizing the sheer physical burden of James's guilt. The Nurses utilize a stop-motion choreography, their movements erratic, making them feel like puppeteered broken dolls. When the sirens sound the world doesn’t just change it, moults. The use of flaking paint, falling ash, mimics shedding skin suggesting the town is a living organism, with weeping walls and infectious inhabitants, muted greys and disorientating claustrophobia.
Characters Lost in the Fog
Jeremy Irvine commits to the role with a visible physical intensity, his James appears restless, keyed up and perpetually on edge. While this approach communicates distress, it side steps the defining quality that makes James such an unsettling protagonist: emotional vacancy. In the source material, James is frightening not because he is loud or visibly broken, but because he appears emptied out. We don’t see this temperament til the very end, his eyes completely hollow, and moving with stillness. The result is a tonal mismatch, instead of being invited to sit with what he refuses to feel, the audience is told what James feels. Unintentionally narrowing the characters ambiguity.
The Women of Silent Hill
Mary, Marie and Angela are meant to form a psychological triangulation. In this adaption however, their relationship feels thematically reduced by a preference for emotional legibility. Mary’s anger is rendered too directly, transforming her from an internalized moral wound into a familiar source of marital conflict. Angela’s trauma, while treated with sincerity, is externalized through visible fragility rather than the numbed detachment that once made her feel like a ghost already half-consumed by the town. Maria, designed as an artificial comfort, is played with such warmth that she reads less as an uncanny projection and more as a conventional romantic foil. Individually, these performances are proficient; together, they fail to generate the uneasy relational tension the story requires.
Final Verdict
Return to Silent Hill is an enigmatic experience. It is perhaps the most visually accurate video game adaptation ever put to film, yet it feels fundamentally disconnected from the "why" of the story. It is a gorgeous gallery of horrors that forgets to make you care about the person walking through them. A visual feast for the fans, but a hollow echo of the masterpiece that inspired it.
'Return to Silent Hill' is out now in cinemas.
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