In most cases, when one adapts a videogame into a feature film, it is the aesthetic that is getting adopted. While many games possess narratives – and increasingly sophisticated ones – they are a poor match for the non-interactive, but much more detailed, requirements of cinema. With this in mind, if we were to assess all of the videogame-to-film adaptations to date purely on look and tone, then Christophe Gans’ 2006 feature Silent Hill would have to rank close to the top.

The original videogame was released in 1999 by Konami for the Sony PlayStation. It was wonderfully creepy and weird, and often quite disturbing, and blended a strong Clive Barker-inspired design with a seemingly endless grey mist of fog and ash that partially obscured everything. It is a look that Gans adopts religiously, and works just as in film as it does in games. In the game the fog is a technical masterstroke, as it limits the number of polygons the 3D graphics engine must render and thus improves the overall look of the work. In the film it is a huge boon because it replicates the scary effect of scenes set in the dark while also presenting those scenes in a much brighter fashion. It is a distinctive and valuable look.

All that in mind, the screenplay struggles because it attempts to situate the town of Silent Hill in more of a real world context than the game, and struggles to relate a much more conventional – and certainly more understandable – story than its source material. The film sees a woman named Rose (Radha Mitchell) take her adopted daughter (Jodelle Ferland) to Silent Hill – a town she has never heard about, but which her daughter pines for in her sleep. Once entering the down, which is enveloped in the constantly falling ash of a coal mine disaster, she suffers a car crash and blacks out. When she is awake, her daughter is missing somewhere in the twisted, nightmarish streets of Silent Hill.

Somewhat decent performances by Mitchell, Amanda Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, and the ever-reliable Sean Bean to a lot to lift the quality of the piece, but there is little denying that Roger Avary’s moribund screenplay threatens to torpedo an otherwise well-developed and visual interesting film. Things get particularly messy towards the end of the second act, where it honestly feels like all momentum grinds to a halt while a character delivers a lengthy explanation of whatever the hell is going on.

Whatever is going on, it looks fantastic. It is also boosted by a nicely creepy soundscape-based score, co-composed by original game composer Akira Yamaoka. Concentrate on the design of the piece, and Silent Hill is a very effective and perverse fantasy thriller. Pay too much attention to the writing, and it will become a a much more hollow, unedifying experience.