A step in the right direction for console-to-screen transitions and a twisted masterpiece of set design. Ultimately, though, it's a little too much like watching someone else play the game.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
In the end, Silent Hill degenerates into an overblown replay of all those "Twilight Zone" and Stephen King stories in which outsiders stumble upon a time-warped location from which there's no escape.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
The worst kind of horror movie: trash that takes itself seriously.
Buried beneath Silent Hill’s hyper-stylized stupidity (the film looks like a collaboration between David Fincher, Trent Reznor and music video director Mark Romanek) is the hollow effort to bottle something of the zeitgeist unease surrounding religious fundamentalism.
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
It packs in a few scary moments and offers a nicely ambiguous conclusion. In Silent Hill, atmosphere trumps storyline.
A great-looking but stupefyingly incoherent supernatural thriller adapted from a popular video game that ransacks the entire catalog of horror film tropes for more than two mind-numbing hours.
TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh
Runs out of story a good half hour before it runs out of spooky images, but it comes to a quietly chilling conclusion far more haunting than any bloody mayhem.
San Francisco Chronicle by Peter Hartlaub
Silent Hill has plenty of bad acting, bad dialogue and a confusing plot -- all of which become exponentially more painful when the movie goes on forever.
The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett
Witless, soulless and joyless, it displays its video game origins throughout.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Although I did not understand the story, I would have appreciated a great deal less explanation. All through the movie, characters are pausing in order to offer arcane back-stories and historical perspectives and metaphysical insights and occult orientations. They talk and talk and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain.