Spoiler Warning: this review discusses the plot and contains stronger language than usual.

Recommend: No

Return to Silent Hill is a 2026 horror film directed and co-written by Christophe Gans, with Sandra Vo-Anh and William Josef Schneider, adapting Konami's 2001 game Silent Hill 2. It runs 106 minutes, stars Jeremy Irvine as James Sunderland and Hannah Emily Anderson as Mary, was made for twenty-three million dollars and took forty-seven and a half million worldwide. It holds an eighteen percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from sixty-six critics, a twenty-eight percent audience score, and a four out of ten on IMDb.

Past me was stupid. Past me stood on this site earlier in the year and declared he had seen the worst film of the year, possibly of his life. Past me was a sheltered and naive individual who had simply not yet encountered this.

Every single person involved in this production should be ashamed that it exists.

I also want to register a formal complaint with Amazon Prime, which recommended this to me directly. Prime looked at everything it knows about my viewing habits and concluded that I would enjoy this. I would like to know what I have done to deserve that.

Here is the thing that has stayed with me most. I have never played a Silent Hill game. Not one. I have no personal attachment to this series whatsoever. And I am still genuinely furious on behalf of the people who do, because this must have been an infinitely worse experience for them than it was for me.

And the more I read, the worse it became.

Silent Hill 2 is not merely a well-regarded game. It is routinely placed among the greatest horror games ever made, described by critics as Mount Rushmore material for the genre, and widely credited with pioneering the idea that a horror game could be driven by story and psychology rather than combat. It is a genuine landmark.

Christophe Gans has been attempting to adapt it since December 2006. Twenty years. He and Roger Avary were originally hired by Sony to do exactly this two decades ago. He has had twenty years to think about this film, and this is what arrived.

And he is not some stranger to the material, which makes it considerably worse. Gans directed the 2006 Silent Hill film, which was given a critical kicking at the time and has since aged genuinely well, to the point that it is now frequently cited as one of the better video game adaptations ever produced. Its atmosphere, its design and its creeping nastiness all hold up. The same man made that film and then made this one.