Return to Silent Hill is an insult to Silent Hill 2

I never imagined a singular gravestone could piss me off this much

When I first heard that Christophe Gans was directing a film adaptation of Silent Hill 2, I was cautiously optimistic. Gans was the mind behind 2006's Silent Hill — arguably the least-awful film in the franchise — and I figured the 20 years he'd had to reflect on the flaws of the first film would prevent his new movie, Return to Silent Hill, from being a total disappointment.

But after leaving a local screening of Return to Silent Hill last weekend, I wasn't just disappointed, I was furious (and frankly, baffled beyond words). In one singular shot of a gravestone, Gans absolutely destroys three of the game’s most pivotal NPC characters. It's hard to decide which of the three gets the shortest end of the stick here, but personally, I think it's fan-favorite Angela Orosco, portrayed by Hannah Elizabeth Anderson in the film.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Return to Silent Hill.]

Gans' changes to Silent Hill 2's characters start off small. Rather than an unremarkable everyman, protagonist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine) is now an edgy, artsy, brooding fellow who wears jewelry, paints weird portraits of himself as Pyramid Head, and smokes weed in his Mustang. Rather than his connection to the town of Silent Hill being a result of the honeymoon he spent there with his deceased wife Mary (Hannah Elizabeth Anderson), Return to Silent Hill portrays Mary as a local resident, who James meets at a rest stop as she's trying to leave town.

You may have noticed that this is the second time Hannah Elizabeth Anderson's name has popped up, and that's because — for reasons I still cannot fathom — Gans cast Anderson as Mary (depicted in the movie as James' girlfriend, rather than his wife), Maria (a sexy doppelganger version of Mary, born of James' grief and sexual frustration), and Angela.

Angela is largely beloved by the Silent Hill 2 fandom and appears on the American box art for the original game. In Gans' film, Angela finds herself trapped in Silent Hill alongside James, Maria, Eddie (a violent, paranoid man played by Pearse Egan) and Laura (a little girl who befriended Mary while she was sick in the hospital, played by Evie Templeton). In both the film and the games, Angela's backstory is heartbreaking — growing up, she was sexually abused by her father and brother, and though it appears most, or all, of her family is dead by the time she crosses paths with James, it's clear the mental scars haven't even begun to fade. In the games, she's understandably terrified of men, and ultimately kills herself (but not before absolutely roasting James for being a coward and a hypocrite).

Movie-Angela shares game-Angela's backstory, but the similarities end there. In the games (prior to her suicide), James stumbles across Angela trapped in a room with the Abstract Daddy (a monster resembling two people fused to a mattress, clearly meant to represent Angela's abuse at the hands of her father). James defeats the monster, but once it's down, Angela deals the killing blow. In Gans' film, the Abstract Daddy isn't especially abstract — it is very clearly a human-mattress monster, and it promptly absorbs Angela into it before ultimately bursting into flames in a scene that's as bizarre as it is distasteful.

And that's the end of Angela. No burning staircase monologue. No finishing off the Abstract Daddy by dropping a TV on it. Just gone.

By this point in the film, I didn't think I could be any more disappointed. But a later scene unfortunately proved me wrong. Near the end, James visits Mary's grave, which reveals that Mary's full name is — I shit you not — Mary Angela Laura Crane.

That's right: Mary, Maria, Angela, and Laura (the little girl Mary met in the hospital) are all one person. This collapses Angela's story into Mary's, presumably in an attempt to make Gans' bizarre, "Mary got sick due to weird ritual abuse from a cult, not an actual illness" plot point sort of make sense. But all it does is relegate a beloved character to the sidelines, making her agonizing death in the film even more confusing. Rather than going out on her own terms as she did in the games, movie-Angela is absorbed into her abuser, just as Mary is consumed by the sickness she developed at the hands of the local cult. Dragging Laura into this makes even less sense, because aside from James (and arguably Maria), Angela, Laura, and Eddie are the only other "real" people in Silent Hill, each of them there for their own reasons. If Angela and Laura are the same person (Mary), then what the hell is Eddie? Eddie barely gets any screentime in Return to Silent Hill, which is especially odd given that he's apparently the only other real person there besides James.

The rest of the film feels like some sort of terrible speedrun. We get a flashback to James smothering Mary to death in her hospital bed, but unlike in the game, movie-James does this at movie-Mary's explicit request, defeating the entire purpose of James being in Silent Hill to begin with. Movie-James isn't a selfish murderer who was drawn to Silent Hill to atone for his sins, he just kind of… ends up there after briefly dating a woman whose health is later destroyed by a cult, and ultimately granting her wish to be put out of her misery. Gans briefly attempts to recreate the original game's "In Water" ending, which sees James drive his car (and Mary's body) into Toluca Lake, but in yet another terrible plot twist, movie-James is inexplicably transported back to the day he and Mary first met. This time, he picks Mary up and wisely drives away from Silent Hill, rather than taking her back into town. The end.

The revelation that Mary, Angela, and Laura are all one person is meant to be a shocking plot twist, but it's not especially effective. Plot twists aren't good simply because the audience didn't see them coming, they're good when the audience should have seen them coming. Silent Hill 2 already has a somewhat complex plot, and with a runtime of only one hour and 46 minutes, there was even less room for changes to a story that didn't need changing in the first place. Gans genuinely seems to be a fan of the Silent Hill franchise, but after witnessing both of his attempts to bring the game to life on the silver screen, I'm convinced he doesn't understand it.

Despite Bloober Team's extremely well-received 2024 remake proving that all you need for a good Silent Hill 2 adaptation is a willingness to be faithful to the plot, Gans seems to have decided that the iconic story was in need of significant changes. The result is a film that isn't just incoherent — it's insulting.