Silent Hill (2006) is directed by Christophe Gans and stars Radha Mitchell as Rose Da Silva and Jodelle Ferland as Alessa Gillespie. The film is often viewed as a failed adaptation of the beloved Silent Hill video game franchise, but for women – especially those raised within patriarchal faiths – the film is something else entirely. Silent Hill (2006) is a descent narrative where a mother enters a child’s wound, and this downward exploration of trauma is akin not to the Silent Hill franchise but instead its muse, Jacob’s Ladder.
All else is a spoiler. Please watch the film before continuing. Consider watching Jacob’s Ladder as well!
Content Note: discussion of religious trauma, sexual violence, and abuse.
Atmospheric Inheritance
The atmosphere shared between Jacob’s Ladder, Silent Hill (2006), and the Silent Hill game franchise is the most obvious tie between the three. The dingy, rusted landscapes strike the body like visual tetanus. These spaces are immediately aggressive.
And when not aggressive, these are surreal. The three concepts force the viewer through liminal spaces, a once inhabited landscape of disorienting fog or falling ash: the thin veil between dreams and reality, life and death. Likely the battle approached when we near our end –a glimpse of what is to come.
All three provide a narrative downward descent, approaching a pain, with the converging locus a hospital that provides no relief. Twitch horror and madness stalk the characters who still relate to these spaces through human rules. At its base, healing is not always an external institution, and this pain is cruel irony. The only true relief comes from the internal battle of self-confrontation. Here is where Jacob’s Ladder and Silent Hill 2 (SH2) differ from Silent Hill 1 (SH1) and Silent Hill (2006): the internal battle.
Feminist Re-Mapping and Community as Healing
Where the male protagonists often descend into their own sins or traumas, Rose descends into the pain inflicted on her daughter. Rose’s battle is not an internal one, but an external battle rooted in religious violence. In doing so, Rose takes on the trauma of another, violating the structure of the film’s predecessors. But Rose is a woman. And in being a woman, she rejects the masculine myth that healing occurs through solitary self-confrontation.
A single act of defiance at the start of the film sets this tone, “Sharon is my child!” Two things happen at this point. First, a direct confrontation with then-current Western religious belief. Namely, a child is not yours unless biologically so – even in vitro was considered unholy. And second, a mother’s ownership is declared, not of Sharon but of Sharon’s pain. Sharon is lost and at that decisive moment her mother proclaims she will find her daughter. This is the crucial difference between Silent Hill (2006) and the source material. The masculine myth is cast aside, and a feminine framework is adopted. Community is the source of both healing and damnation.
In SH1, Harry Mason is the source of salvation for Cheryl; albeit not cleanly or definitively. While a well-respected game, and rightfully so, this is a continuation of the trope wherein a woman vanishes to advance a man’s plot. The Silent Hill film negates this trope and in doing so shifts the lens to the patriarchal apparatuses themselves because now the actors are women. This provides a clean, striking commentary. When there is homogeny amongst the parts, the structural anatomy of the very system can be analyzed and reviewed. In Silent Hill (2006), that structure is found spoiled, decayed, rotting.
The Church
In Silent Hill (2006), the church functions as a patriarchal system. Aware or otherwise, the film observes how women administer the patriarchy. And the result of this observation reveals nuance in its simplicity: women will assign sin to other women. Women are investigated, interrogated, and punished exclusively. The arbiters need not be male to do it, they merely need to follow the processes and procedures.
The function of sin in Silent Hill (2006) is nearly administrative rather than moral. There are many moral grievances that go unnoticed, unaddressed. Instead, it is the rank-and-file break from women that receives punishment, the goal not to increase public well-being but instead to ensure resolution. When the issue is grey, the resolution must be made black and white. As seen through the witch trials, the autonomy of the women is proffered by the church for that solution, and the women are cast into darkness. But it is not personal, it is simply to restore process, a “best practice” of policy.
The administrative process needed tidying and with this the burden of sin passed from mother to daughter. Alessa’s abuse is the result of the paperwork. It was never about Alessa but instead, forcing clarity. This came at the cost of women, by the decision of the church. Alessa’s waking nightmare is a structural consequence of administrative sin.
The Architect Dreamers
James is living the nightmare of his own bad behavior, both Harry and Rose explore the purgatory of another, and Jacob is living the horror between these. Jacob is equal parts the subject of his own misconduct and the recipient of horror beyond his control.
Silent Hill’s source material, Jacob’s Ladder, follows a wartime philosopher. Dubbed “Professor,” Jacob is a philosopher who becomes lost, a thinker trapped in his thoughts, a man whose private refuge turns oubliette – and Jacob is forced to descend into that pit. Jacob experiences lust, the shattering of his family, both angels and demons, as well as the horrors of trauma all within the recesses of his own intellect and yet increasingly discharged into his environment. This is the backbone of the entire Silent Hill franchise: the duality of the mind as it leaches into the world around us.
Jacob’s Ladder, SH1, and the film, all share a thematic architect within the traumatized. However, Silent Hill (2006) is closer to Jacob’s Ladder than SH1 in backstory, as multiple malevolent forces are at work in SH1. The films are far more streamlined. And in this way, Silent Hill (2006) is more faithful to the muse than the source.
In Silent Hill (2006) Alessa is born of a mother who refuses to name a father. The mother, Dahlia, is the sister of the high priestess, Christabella. The priestess insists her sister name a father because in the eyes of the church, this child makes the mother either a whore or a witch. The religious sect suspects the latter, and casts her offspring, Alessa, as sin incarnate. Sin is borne of woman.
Rumors spread, and Alessa is isolated before being hazed, raped, and ultimately burned as a witch by the townsfolk. But Alessa doesn’t die. Instead, a pained and enraged Alessa splits her soul in two. The best of Alessa is transformed into an infant and given new life as the innocent Sharon. The worst of Alessa becomes the architect of Silent Hill. Upon Alessa’s immolation, Silent Hill transforms into a charred town of falling ash and scorched flesh, an unyielding fire burning in its belly.
Alessa is a troubled Jacob using metaphor to express pain. They are similar architect dreamers designing a nightmare world.
Warped Architecture
The Silent Hill film borrows many of the iconographs from the video games. If Alessa is the architect of Silent Hill, then the presence of certain figures within the film’s nightmare world demands accounting. The burned children who haunt Rose upon her arrival are present in SH1 and belong. However, the Puppet Nurses of SH1 are replaced with the Bubble Head Nurses of SH2. This is an obvious fan service in an otherwise feminist work, or perhaps a concession to recognizability. And then there is Pyramid Head.
The easiest criticism is the presence of Pyramid Head. Pyramid Head is introduced in SH2 through images of rape, a manifestation of James’s lust (and perhaps guilt, punishment, and desire for judgment). Yet in Silent Hill 2006, Pyramid Head still serves a relevant function, no longer of repression but of aggression.
Pyramid Head brutalizes the women it encounters; it traps women in narrow corridors and is seen stripping a woman of her clothes and then of her very flesh. The assigned function is the same, the lens is different – from repression to aggressor. Pyramid Head is no longer a rapist of headless, pitiful women but instead the sexual assailant of women we come to know and care for. This is not James’s psychology misplaced; it is Alessa’s trauma repurposing a familiar form.
This repurposing is furthered in wielding Abstract Daddy. In SH2, Abstract Daddy is the father and rapist of Angela, a character James encounters. The abstraction is a metaphor for dissociation surrounding childhood sexual violence. In Silent Hill (2006), this creature functions as the manifestation of the janitor and rapist of Alessa. No longer a confused memory of a traumatized child, it is repurposed as an assailant painfully contorted by the survivor. In Silent Hill (2006), Abstract Daddy is Alessa’s trauma with all of her agency.
Alessa is not only a scared child, but also the architect of a new world, forcing the nightmare she burdened upon its inhabitants. The rusted, dark pit of Jacob but with the infestations of sexual abuse.
The Neutral Ending
Throughout the film, Rose obtains help from the other women trapped within Silent Hill, and in the bowels of the church, she chooses to help another. Within the depths of Silent Hill, Rose offers aid to its architect, Alessa. Rose’s offer of aid is as likely to take her daughter home as it is her disgust for what the church has done to a traumatized child. In this moment, Rose assumes Alessa’s pain.
Resurfacing, Rose, the mother of an adopted bastard child condemns the congregation for what they have done, and she is right. In “good for her” tradition, Rose bleeds Alessa into the church where the child exacts her revenge. This scene is as grotesque as it is satisfying for Alessa.
Rose finds Sharon, wraps her arms around her and tells her not to view the scene. Sharon sees more than she should, hinting at an awareness in her that Rose does not possess. They return home, a touch away from their life before. Harry feels their presence but cannot see them. Rose sinks upon her couch. Sharon appears listlessly aware that they aren’t truly home, but on another plane entirely.
The Silent Hill games offer an array of endings, from good to bad to UFO. This ending is a classic neutral where Rose does all she can do, but perhaps the correct combination at the wrong time, a right turn instead of a left. The cosmic misalignment that leads to her driving home on the wrong side of the veil and inhabiting a shrouded house.
Conclusion
Silent Hill (2006) is a gorgeous blend of the games, the muse, and a nuance that empowers the other half of its audience. A mother casts aside fear of damnation, battles the traumatic manifestations of the pained architect dreamer, descends away from light, and embraces a child desperate for love; only to receive the bittersweet neutrality so often offered in this world and perhaps the next. It is the psychological horror of our personal oubliettes, our fortresses turned prisons, but one where our remedy is the external grace of others.