Return To Silent Hill

Dodgy Pyramid Scheme

Return To Silent Hill
Directed by Christophe Gans
France/United States/United Kingdom/
Germany/Serbia/Japan 2025
Entertainment Film Distributors
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: A hill full of spoilers herein, I guess. 

Well, okay then. 

I was kinda looking forward to a third Silent Hill movie when it was announced, especially since it’s directed by Christophe Gans, who did the first movie and who also directed the masterpiece that is Brotherhood Of The Wolf (reviewed by me here). This third film, Return To Silent Hill, is kind of a soft reboot for the franchise in that the only returning characters I could detect here are the grotesque nurses and, of course, Pyramid Head.

However, it has to be said that, for a good deal of the running time I was a bit disappointed in this one (although for the first half an hour or so I was convinced this would be the best of the three to date). I certainly had no problem with the lack of context to the surrealistic nightmare that was the town of Silent Hill and all that goes on in its environs, that’s for sure. And following an almost optimistic, love story approach to the opening of the story, the quick spiral into the main lead (played by Jeremy Irvine) going to the town in question in search of his girlfriend (played by Hannah Emily Anderson) and the driven, unflinching and unrelenting plunge into frequent, morbid and nightmarish suspense was something which initially had me on the edge of my seat. Again though, only for about half an hour or so until I figured out something... and here’s where my short review gets kinda spoilery folks. 

After a direct confrontation between the male lead and the fan favourite Pyramid Head, I figured out something pretty basic about the nature of these two and so I stopped caring about what was going to happen to the anti-hero of the piece. If I’m not very much mistaken (and it’s made both clear and then obscured or muddied by the last sequence of the film, as I see it), then the main protagonist is also an aspect of Pyramid Head, from what I could tell... or did I get that wrong? He’s just a self induced metaphor for the horrors of Silent Hill. That’s my interpretation of the visual data here, at least. 

So after this... I knew he couldn’t come to any harm and I kinda stopped caring (although it’s not made implicit until near the end of the movie for the ‘hard of thinking’, it seems to me). And, although the film is well made in terms of inventiveness (presumably culled from the video game Silent Hill 2, which I’ve not played myself, only the first one) and it’s very well put together, I had a few other problems with the movie too. 

One of those is... it’s not all that scary. Which should be a cardinal sin for a film in this particular franchise. For instance, the sexy, mutant nurse thingies which were such a marvelous and terrifying element of the first two movies, seem to have absolutely no visual impact here at all. It almost feels like the director has included them because people expect them to be here. But the effect of them is totally diluted and they seem an easy enough challenge to overcome. 

And the other big thing which really unsettled me was the way in which some of the acting was rendered. Especially the main lead played by Jeremy Irvine. Now congratulations to Gans if this was indeed supposed to look flat and clumsy like a video game interpretation of living human beings but, I don’t know, was it something in the make up or lighting that made me feel that Irvine wasn’t even on set. He felt, a lot of the time, like a bad CGI render of a person, much like you would find in a game. And it was totally off putting and maybe contributed to my personal apathy in regards to this film. I am caring much less about manipulated pixels and much more about flesh and blood when I watch a movie. It’s almost like the director ran a filter or some such thing over some of the main characters to make them seem more lifeless than perhaps they should have been. So, if it was a deliberate choice then well done for making me think I was watching a video game but... yeah, I don’t want to see a video game when I’m sitting in a cinema. I want to see something that will move me or connect with me on an intellectual level, rather than break everything down to something somewhat lesser than the sum of its pixels. Which is sadly what happened here for me. 

And so that’s my main takeaway from Return To Silent Hill, I’m afraid. It started off well like a white knuckle ride but steadily lost any traction as I lost empathy for any of the characters or the situations they found themselves in. What I thought would be my favourite film in the franchise turns out to be the worst entry in the series. So, yeah, nothing more to say on this one, I’m afraid, That’s me done on these for a while.  

The Purge TV Show

Purge Resurge

The Purge TV Show
Season 1
Sept 4th - Nov 6th 2018 - 10 episodes
Season 2
Oct 15th - Dec 17th 2019 10 episodes

Warning: Very mild spoilers.

Okay, so I quite like the majority of The Purge movies because the old school sci-fi concept is sound and they manage to do something a little different with each one. In terms of turning this film series of sci-fi thrillers into a TV show goes... I was not optimistic. Not all but, most TV adaptations of successful movies are generally soaped up, pale shades of their source material but, I figured I’d maybe give the first episode of The Purge TV show a go just in case.

Well, I was so surprised by this. Not only are both series absolutely brilliant and just as scary as the movies, they also manage to do something slightly different from each other and I really loved this show. Both seasons are connected only by the concept of The Purge and Dermot Mulroney pops up in both as a DJ  presenter, pumping up his listeners to go out into the streets to purge. And the main cast of characters on each season is completely different from the other, with no other connects and with very different storylines.

The first season does more or less what you think it will do and it mostly takes place on a purge night (both seasons are set somewhere between the second and third movie). This one sets up a few major character strands...

So most of the first episode is set within a few hours before the Annual Purge. We have Jessica Garza as Penelope. She has sent her ex-marine brother a note, basically saying good bye as she is part of a religious cult who drive around on purge night in a bus, giving themselves to purgers as a sacrifice (and, of course, you know her mindset on that issue is going to change once she is in the thick of it and discovers the corruption and real motive behind the cult). Then we have her brother Miguel, played by Gabriel Chavarria, who is it on the streets trying to track down his sister before she gets killed.

We next have a young couple played by Hannah Emily Anderson and Colin Woodell, who are invited to a purge party by the National Founding Fathers (the NFF, a political power who created and implement the annual purge) and they accept because they need to get money for their company from the man running the party. They once had an awkward sexual threesome with a girl played by Lili Simmons, who they think is in another country but she’s not, she’s at the party... and she’s the daughter of the man they are depending on for financing.

And then there’s a young, ambitious office worker played by Amanda Warren, who is working with her colleagues in a locked down office building on purge night but who has arranged a ‘hit by proxy’ on her boss (played by William Baldwin). Something she now regrets and wants to prevent.

Finally, there’s a guy called Joe, played by Lee Tergesen. He is fully kitted out for purge night and is going around rescuing various people on his special list and taking them to safety... including, it turns out, all of the characters I’ve mentioned so far. However, as you might expect, he has a slightly more sinister motivation for his actions and, by the final couple of episodes, it turns out he’s an even bigger threat than some of the horrendous, violent individuals the other come into contact with throughout the night.

So, yeah, the next nine episodes of series one are basically playing out like a Purge movie except there’s more time to explore various concepts like a ‘kill carnival’, a raid on a ‘purge party’ and a sexualised trap for women etc. The cinematography and lighting is all great and, yeah, it feels dangerous. My only real problem with the first season was the constant flashbacks to the sexual threesome because, bizarrely, everyone is naked but you don’t actually see anybody’s sexual organs. It just looks unnatural and wrong and I wish they had just alluded to it instead of pretending to show it because, yeah, this is how not to do a sex scene in a TV show or movie. The violence is pretty gruesome though, it has to be said, possibly more so than the movies, if you're into that element of it.

As you would expect, some of these characters survive the purge, others don’t and, after a brief wind up so that you can see what any survivors are doing in the wake of the purge followed by a quick lead in showing what two of them are up to for the next purge, the show ends. And its brilliant but, rather than continuing with these surviving characters, the second show does something different again.

Okay, so three quarters of the first episode of season two takes place over the last two hours of purge night, where the main characters are initially set up...

There’s Esme, played by Paola Nuñez. She is part of a government group who monitors the purge from an office of screens to ensure nothing illegal (well, more illegal) takes place and nothing goes against the accepted rules. However, she sees something amiss which ultimately leads to finding information that the NFF are basically killing people ‘off-purge’ because of certain psychological findings about the national holiday and she ends up as America’s most wanted fugitive for her trouble. With all her surveillance equipment and her paranoia, it starts off in similar territory to Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation before, turning into something far more worrying.

Then we have Joel Allen who is out on purge when he doesn’t want to be, is left behind by his college room mate and almost gets killed. However, killing his assailant leads to an addiction to violence and he becomes an off-purge serial killer for the rest of the series.

We have Marcus, played by Derek Luke and his wife. Someone has put a ‘purge bounty’ out on Marcus but, will he find out who and somehow be able to get it removed before the next annual purge?

And finally we have Ryan, played by Max Martini. He and his ex-cop colleagues are bank robbers (they don’t want to kill but want to legally steal as much money as they can each purge). Something goes wrong in the first episode for them, which leads to an elabourate plan that takes the next year to finesse, ostensibly to get the haul of their lives but, there are other complications too.

And it’s another humdinger of a show. Unlike the first season, where all the character strands converge for the final two episodes, this one has the different strands often rubbing together and crossing paths but never quite all at the same time... although the aftermath of a tragic event where my two favourite characters are killed in the last episode certainly joins up a lot of them and their surrounding co-stars.

The real difference of the second season, though, is that most of the episodes take place in the year between two purges. So after the climax of one purge, it’s not actually until right at the end of episode seven that the next one commences, leaving the last two installments to play out like a standard purge movie but with all the background of the characters developed before hand. And, once again, it shows us different aspects of the purge and what people do when they’re not purging, such as elaborate purge themed game booths where you can virtually kill people or hiring animals to slaughter to vent your violent tendencies between the annual holidays.

Another nice thing about the second season is that each starts off with a pre-credits scene which has nothing to do with the main story and shows us a different aspect of The Purge. For the first one, for example, the lady who provides the regular voice-over ‘yearly introductory warning’ to the event is seen auditioning for the voice role and questioning her lines. Another one in the last episode, set just before the first purge, has a nice little cameo from Ethan Hawke, reprising the ill fated character he played in the first movie. And generally, most of these intro sequences come off like the satirical scenes in the first Robocop movie (the original, not the stupid remake) and give the show a little more of a dark edge, shot through with some very cynical humour.

And, yeah, that’s me done with The Purge TV show. I wish this show hadn’t been cancelled because it’s just as good as the movies (and in the case of the first and fourth movies, this show is way better). This is something which really does go hand in hand with the film series and, to boot, has the time to explore some of the concepts it brings to the table in a little more detail than the films are able to do. This one had me gripped from the start and, certainly, if you like the movies then I would recommend you take a look at the series too.