Film Review: SILENT HILL: REVELATION (2012)

The original Silent Hill (2006) wasn’t the best film in terms of story but it had style and it actually had many surprising and horrifying moments despite the over bloated ending so it was a surprise that a sequel was in the works.  Silent Hill: Revelation (2012) pales in comparison as it borrows the style from the original but has little else going for it. 

 Harry (Sean Bean) and his daughter Heather (Adelaide Clemens) have been moving from town to town under different alias’ after the events of the first film in which Heather was saved from the clutches of Silent Hill by her step mother Rose (Radha Mitchell).  Now Heather is all grown up and she is plagued with nightmares about Silent Hill and hunted by creatures that want her to return.  When her father is kidnapped Heather travels to Silent Hill not only to save her father but to discover her true past and to rid herself of the nightmares.

The film has the makings of a good film as it has all the returning players from the original film but the film has very little in the way of a story that offers anything new that wasn’t in the previous film.  Bean and Mitchell are barely give more than a cameo in the film and instead the film focuses on the teenagers’ plight which is in direct contrast to the first film which focused on Rose’s search for her missing daughter.  This film comes off more as another teen horror film and lacks the depth of the first film.  Clemens also doesn’t have the ability to carry the story on her own.   In the first film Rose’s exploration of Silent Hill yielded strange characters and even stranger horrors whereas in this film Heather’s exploration seems disjointed as if they were vignettes that don’t really go anywhere or connect with the rest of the film.

There are a few stand-out creatures like the spider made of mannequin parts and the nurses return for more mayhem as well as other creatures from the first film but the film lacks the focus of the original and none of these sequences are particularly suspenseful or frightening.  There lies the biggest setback of the film which is the fact that it lacks the drive or atmosphere of the first film rendering much of what happens static and uninteresting.