As Dave Kehr once found himself in “the ridiculous position of sticking up for The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” here am I doing the same for Return to Silent Hill. Director and co-screenwriter Christophe Gans’s pop-arthouse aesthetic stokes several pleasure centers, particularly in the way his movies — like the wonky martial-arts Harlequin horror-fantasy Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) and the original Silent Hill (2006), one of the more inspired video game to mo-pic transpositions — unfold with a taut dream logic that makes their hodgepodge absurdity sublime. Alice Krige getting ripped to shreds by tentacled barbed wire can share communal space with Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean doing a Last Year at Marienbad-esque climactic pas de deux and it strangely feels all of a high/low philosophical piece.
The Resnais vibing, bone-’n’-gristle tactility of the first Silent Hill is replaced in its twenty-years-later followup (this an adaptation of the much-beloved second game in the series) by a digi-augmented chintziness that, on the one hand, is very much a product of a reduced budget, an overseas shoot and a multiplicity of shady investors. On the other, the thought “Lady and the Duke-era Eric Rohmer doing Hellraiser” came frequently to mind. And I’d also posit Coppola’s undersung Twixt as a touchstone given both movies are about a grieving arsehat (in this case, Jeremy Irvine, an easy-on-the-eyes empty vessel) navigating the Kübler-Ross steps within Dante’s CG Inferno.
Some of the visions are plenty bargain-basement, Irvine’s pasted-on flashback beard chief among them. One would certainly be justified dinging Return to Silent Hill as a Cliffs Notes walkthrough of a PS2 peak or a monotonic scare flick that often resembles its own half-assedly pre-viz’d animatic. Yet the stressed-to-the-max, never-slacking Gans-ian ambience (truly one psychically-scarring, Fibonacci-spiraling battle after another) pervades throughout. Is that why I was giddily charmed by the scene in which Irvine’s character runs back and forth along a flame-engulfed hallway that looks like a green-screen projection trapped inside a Zoom call that’s clandestinely broadcasting from the jail-broken Volume soundstage of your Star Wars TV series of choice? To ask is to answer.
Speaking of galaxies far, far the fluck away, a throwaway moment in Bryan Fuller’s effectively straight-to-streaming feature directorial debut Dust Bunny brought to mind a similarly tossed-off instant in that godawful Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries when Moses Ingram catapults across a rooftop in pursuit of Ewan McGregor’s in-hiding Jedi master. The young heroine of Dust Bunny, Sophie Sloan’s Aurora, does the beat-for-beat same while trailing Mads Mikkelsen’s nameless father-figure assassin, down to the from-afar camera composition and the sprawling computer-generated cityscape backdrop, though Fuller throws in a quick insert shot from below that shows the footprints Aurora leaves behind after her shoes hit a grimy glass enclosure.
That there’s the difference between heedlessly hurtling through a void and dynamically existing in a vividly conjured space. And Dust Bunny thrives for a good while on Fuller’s fertile imagination (still best-expressed in his sexually charged, sartorially spectacular TV series Hannibal), which here asks “What if Leon: The Professional but with a ravenous oversized leporid?” The first act is near-perfection, mostly silent and visually inventive (the way, for example, Aurora’s door is always left slightly ajar so that the On-Off flick of the hallway chandelier becomes nerve-rackingly perceptible). Then the twee dialogue hits, the narrative goes boggy, the deficient F/X overwhelm and the tonally dissonant register of the performances — be it Sloan’s irritating precocity or Sigourney Weaver, as Mads’s fiendish handler, running near-empty on the WTF! fumes she better huffed in Walter Hill’s The Assignment and Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener — intros nails wholly to chalkboard. Fuller’s earnest attempt at OG over IP is still, all in all, very much appreciated.
For Timur Bekmambetov’s AI-apologia sci-fi actioner Mercy, a rework of an old Gene Siskel-ism: Is this movie more interesting than a YouTube recording of Chris Pratt extolling RFK Jr. on Club Random with Bill Maher?
No.