Silent Hill: Critic Reviews

Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness.

Structured around a series of blackouts and gross-outs, Silent Hill is one long free fall through icky surrealism and underlighted nightmares.

Maybe it's the kudos acquired by screenwriter Roger Avary in his association with Quentin Tarantino that has allowed him to write this unbelievably boring horror-thriller.

The makers of the movie you're slogging through will spare no expense to demonstrate how much they hate us.

Stuffed with cheap effects and devoid of tension, this French-Japanese-U.S. co-production contributes exactly zilch to the rich film history of those three nations.

Christophe Gans' convoluted, overlong adaptation of the video game Silent Hill is the worst kind of horror movie: trash that takes itself seriously.

Too long by about a half hour, very much in love with its own excessive style, it still manages to be kinda creepy, at least when it stops taking its metaphysics too seriously.

Not only can I not describe the plot of this movie, but I have a feeling the last scene reverses half of what I thought I knew (or didn't know).

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.

A great-looking but stupefyingly incoherent supernatural thriller,

This one is dumber than a bag of coffin nails, despite the directing hand of Christophe Gans.

Though Silent Hill's shoddy dialogue and incoherent story constantly irritate, several sights and scenes possess a certain surreal grandeur.

The film is overlong, with too many unnecessary scenes (a lot of the movie seems like pointless running around), but it packs in a few scary moments and offers a nicely ambiguous conclusion.

Witless, soulless and joyless.

Let's start with the running time for Silent Hill: two hours and five minutes. Totally out of control.

Visually arresting but only sporadically enthralling.

I wouldn't rush to see it again, but I would definitely recommend it...

Whilst not as atrocious as some other films that have opened this year, the truely woeful story and quality of Silent is saved only by its occasion moments of visual flair, and its all over effective creepy atmosphere.

When everything starts being explained, the mystery evaporates and the world of the game loses its eerie bafflement.

The latest, most ambitious and perhaps least comprehensible video game adaptation in recent memory.

If you like your nightmares served upfront without the clutter of dramatic structure, then Silent Hill should be your next stop.

although it is rarely if ever jump-out-of-your-seat scary, Silent Hill is an unremittingly creepy municipality of the mind where motherhood, mystery and madness have come home to stay.

Silent Hill starts out at point A and then goes so quickly, loudly and visually over-the-top that it flies completely off the rails into its own glorious weirdness.

Director Christophe Gans charges, hell-bent, right over the plot and winds up with not much more than an oppressive 125-minute running time.

More deadly than silent.