Return to Silent Hill is attempting to make a movie adaptation of Silent Hill 2. It won’t be the first game in the series to receive a movie adaptation, but it’s a fan-favorite game with a lot of content. There’s also the issue of Silent Hill 2 having multiple endings. While some endings are not meant to be taken seriously, most offer believable closure to protagonist James Sunderland’s journey. The movie will likely pick the ending that the writers feel best fits their adaptation, or they could decide to write a new ending that’s uniquely theirs. This makes it hard to please everyone, but I think that there’s one ending that would be a safe pick for Return to Silent Hill.
Having played the games and seen the movies that are currently available, I learned to go into those adaptations without expectations. I enjoyed them well enough, but they naturally had to make changes to the game stories to fit the main plot and context needed to understand it in the short amount of time a movie allows. The result is not entirely faithful to the games, but a decent enough horror movie. With this in mind, Return to Silent Hill needs to pick an ending that’s satisfying for both the gaming audience and horror movie audience.
Return to Silent Hill Should Use the Leave Ending
A few endings are easy to cut from the running right away. The dog ending would be funny for players, but it’s too ridiculous to use. The Bliss ending, where James ends up inside a VHS tape, is also one that I suspect would be ruled out for not being a satisfying way to end a movie. Then, you have endings like Rebirth and Stillness, which are both dark, but also require a lot of details and background information to make them coherent.
Of all the Silent Hill 2 endings, there are three that you can get on your first playthrough. Those are the Leave, In Water, and Maria endings. This also means that those three endings are the ones most commonly seen by players. Additionally, the Leave ending is often seen as being canon, and it’s likely the happiest ending you can get. Since it’s one that is generally known by players, it’s a solid choice for an ending in Return to Silent Hill. Also, I imagine that the movie is already going to be heavy just because of the content of the game, so ending it on a bit of a lighter note can help viewers leave the movie with a bit of hope for James’ future.
The Maria Ending Could Be Beautifully Thematic
I could also make an argument for the Maria ending being the best choice for Return to Silent Hill if the writers want to go for a more conflicting feeling to end the movie. To get the Maria ending in-game, players have to go through the story while paying extra attention to Maria and showing affection for her. Then, you get to fight Mary as the boss instead, which leads to James leaving Silent Hill with Maria.
This ending comes with extra ambiguity. In the Leave ending, you can assume that James raises Laura as his daughter and they have a relatively decent life after leaving Silent Hill. That’s not the case with the Maria ending. In fact, this ending leaves you assuming that James and Maria won’t have a happy ending. It’s right in the final moments of the cutscene that Maria coughs, and James says she should get the cough taken care of.
I love the idea of the Maria ending if the movie’s writers want to go for a tragic option instead of the happier choice. Maria coughing implies that she—like Mary, whom she’s created in the image of—will end up with an illness that could be terminal, forcing James to go through another cycle of love and loss. It’s bittersweet to an extent. James finds love again in Maria, only to lose her the same way as Mary, and that could even mean that he kills her with his own hands, too. It would certainly be a dramatic choice for an ending.
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It’s not easy to adapt games into movies with the limited amount of screentime you have to fit in dozens of hours of content from a game. When there are multiple endings, then there’s another layer of difficulty, because you can’t please everybody when you have to choose a single conclusion. As a result, I think that the Leave and Maria endings are the safest options for Return to Silent Hill, since they’re two of the most common endings that players earn, and you have the choice between a happy ending and a tragic one. The actual best choice between these two then depends on the tone that the movie’s writers want to end on.
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