Silent Hill 2006 International, Christophe Gans.

Silent Hill, adapted from the video game of the same title by French director Christophe Gans (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) is not a masterpiece, but I think that the outrage being leveled at it by the critical community (it scores a paltry 25% at Rotten Tomatoes) is unwarranted. Silent Hill is as interesting as it is imperfect, both as a horror film and as the latest (arguably most successful) attempt to marry the ever-expanding universe of video games to the silver screen.

The film opens with nine year-old Sharon Da Silva (Jodelle Ferland) sleepwalking across a highway. Her parents Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) find her teetering at the edge of a cliff, over which a neon cross hovers in the distance, screaming "Silent Hill! Silent Hill!" We briefly see the scene through Sharon's eyes: the cliff leads downward into a blazing inferno.

Rose arbitrarily decides that the only thing to do is to find this Silent Hill which, as it happens, is the name of a West Virginia town (modeled after Centralia, PA) abandoned since 1974 after all of its inhabitants were killed in a mining disaster. So she sets off with Sharon, in the middle of the night no less, against her husband's advice and the sinister warnings of a local diner waitress. She's pulled over by a traffic cop (Laurie Holden) but speeds off into the town where an apparition that bears a striking resemblance to Sharon causes her to veer off the road. She hits her head on the steering wheel and passes out; when she comes to again, Sharon is gone.

The next part of the film unfolds with the logic of dreams and video games. Rose, joined by the cop, wanders about the town trying to solve the mysteries of Sharon's whereabouts and the town's demise. These scenes have an ethereal beauty, alternating between daytime, in which ash falls over Silent Hill like snow, and the intermittent horrors of an artificial night, heralded by sirens, in which the town is transformed into a demon-populated hell.

This portion of the film has been criticized as illogical, but it makes sense to an audience raised on video games. The scene in which Rose reaches into the mouth of a corpse to pull out a tile bearing the name of a hotel, for instance, mimics the act of looking for clues in an adventure game. These games are by their very nature "illogical" because characters are motivated by a logic specific to the game that doesn't necessarily make sense when transposed onto real life. In an adventure game clues allow the player to advance through the narrative, and here they permit Rose to move forward through the plot.