Critics have also focused on the scene late in the film in which Rose enters a hospital room and the screen abruptly, shockingly fades to white. Sharon's doppelgänger Alessa (also Jodelle Ferland) congratulates Rose in voiceover for successfully "following her clues" to get to this far. An extended sequence, marked by grainy footage and bits of leader, explains the film's back story. This scene struck many critics as out of place, coming so late in the film, but gamers are familiar with exposition, in the form of a cutscene, being used as a reward for successfully navigating a portion of the game.

Sometimes Silent Hill's attempts to mix the aesthetics of gaming and movies don't work, such as the unnecessarily long scene in which Rose memorizes a map of the hospital basement. Ocassionally watching Silent Hill feels like watching someone else play a video game, with the attendant feelings of helplessness and boredom. Gans is to be commended, though, for trying to imbue his film with spirit of the material he's adapting.

The latter part of Silent Hill explodes with the fury of an arthouse horror flick. A bloodbath set in a church, it melds the anti-Catholic intensity of Luis Buñuel with imagery reminiscent of Frida Kahlo. It also serves as a cathartic release for the tension created by the film's sinister invocation of religious motifs. Only a horror film can reduce an entire universe of societal unease into a single scene of orgiastic violence, and in this regard at least Silent Hill must rank as one of the genre's most memorable entries.

By so closely associating the demon child Alessa with the fundamentalist religion of Silent Hill's ghostly denizens, Silent Hill also points the way towards understanding horror's fascination with creepy children (The Ring, The Shining). Fear is an emotional response to the unknown, and in many Christian faiths children are regarded as somehow closer to heaven and to God. The ultimate mystery, and therefore the ultimate horror, might be the fear of what we've forgotten.

Like a video game, and like many experimental films, Silent Hill forces us to adapt to its world, instead of trying to adapt itself to ours. It can be illogical and infuriating, but the promise is that by learning to exist in the world of the film we might learn a bit more about living in our own. Silent Hill doesn't entirely deliver on this promise, but it is an interesting attempt. In many circles video games are regarded as an ascendant art form, the movies one in decline. In trying to marry the two, Christophe Gans teaches us something about the ways each work, and as such Silent Hill is a film worthy of consideration and study.