Silent Hill: Revelation
Shoddy horror sequel a waste of Canuck craft.
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL J. BASSETT
Inspired by the warped genius of Team Silent’s Masahiro Itō, and executed by what was evidently a talented Torontonian crew, the otherwise wretched Silent Hill: Revelation boasts impressively nightmarish production design. Decrepit sets peopled by Itō’s necrophilic fantasy objects apart, though, Revelation feels less like a nightmare than the sort of dream your subconscious might generate on a particularly sub-par night at the office.
As an adaptation of the third entry in Konami’s outlandish “survival horror” video game series, the senselessness of Revelation‘s plot—which involves a teenager’s bid to foil the machinations of netherworld-dwelling demonic cultists—should come as little surprise. But whereas the game at least managed to impart in its players a sense of visceral dread, Revelation‘s spookiness is strictly superficial, and is undermined by indifferent performances, worse dialogue, and slapdash pacing that saps the film of all suspense.
Indeed, if there’s anything genuinely eerie about Revelation, it’s the degree to which lead actress Adelaide Clemens resembles a younger—and, on this evidence, less talented—Michelle Williams. Similarly, the closest Revelation comes to “gut-wrenching” is the vicarious embarrassment of witnessing Carrie-Anne Moss prattling inanely as a platinum-wigged occult priestess.
