THE ONLY GAME IN SPOOK TOWN

REVIEWED - SILENT HILL: For the third time in the last six months, Sean Bean finds himself comforting a woman whose daughter has vanished off the face of the earth. Silent Hill, a preposterously baroque but occasionally diverting adaptation of a popular video game, shares certain architectural features with Flightplan and The Dark.

All three begin agreeably enough. All three end in narrative incoherence of the highest order

Silent Hill is, apparently, written by Roger Avary, co-creator of Pulp Fiction, but its sloppy structure and dependence on banal puzzles betray the malign influence of its source material.

Radha Mitchell, disturbed by her daughter's sleepwalks, during which she makes mention of "Silent Hill", brings the tyke to a ghost town of that name. After encountering ambulatory hunks of organic tissue, modelled, perhaps, on those in Francis Bacon's paintings, the two are separated and Mom is forced to potter about the grim locale in search of clues. Again and again, she solves problems in a manner that might satisfy the first-person gamer, but are enormously tedious for the third-person cinemagoer to watch. Memorise this map. Use the knife to uncover the secret door. That sort of thing.

Eventually, after a great deal of dull meandering, the film explodes into a hysterical paroxysm of possession, immolation, religious fervour and mass witchcraft. Had the film been a little more economical, the incomprehensible frenzy might have been good fun. Coming, as it does, at the end of such a sluggishly overlong frivolity, it only heightens one's lingering urge to hit the off-button on the supposed games console lurking beneath the screen.