Resident Evil
Writers: Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten
Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis, Zach Cherry
Zach Cregger's films thrive on a sense that we're being pulled along into some great vortex of unpredictability, a series of scenes and images that don't necessarily signal where they'll turn next, shielding the narrative framework until the last possible moment. There's an uncertainty to his narratives in films like Barbarian and Weapons, but he's such a competent and entertaining filmmaker on a scene-by-scene level that you're willing to go with him into the darkness, until he finally lays out the game.
How, then, does a filmmaker like Cregger tackle his first franchise property in Resident Evil, a video game series that has, to this point, built decades of lore and character into its very bones? The answer is deceptively simple: By keeping things small, right up until they're not. The result is another unpredictable thrill ride by one of horror's best contemporary crowd-pleasers, a ruthless riot of a movie that'll have you cackling and screaming at the same time.
Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier, taking organs and samples and other bits of biology from clinic to clinic, hospital to hospital, and he's about to have a very rough night. He's already in the middle of a potentially life-changing conversation with this girlfriend, and he really needs to get home, but he just got an offer to earn double his pay by delivering a priority package to Raccoon City General Hospital. The job is straightforward: Drive straight to Raccoon City, deliver the package, don't stop and don't hesitate. What Bryan doesn't know, of course, is that he's driving into a world of horrors, as a mysterious outbreak starts to emanate from Raccoon City and the shady Umbrella Corporation.
Cregger keeps the familiar locales of the franchise, as well as its corporate antagonist, but for much of its runtime Resident Evil plays like an even more intimate survival horror scenario than those first games. For much of its runtime, it's literally just the story of a guy trying to solve one problem after another, starting with a fateful car accident and continuing all the way through finding a working phone, getting around a hostile attack dog (oh yes, Cregger remembered Resident Evil's many dogs), or just literally trying to walk down a street without getting noticed by monsters. The Resident Evil of it all, from the realities of Umbrella's insidiousness to the ever-expanding bestiary of grander and grander monsters, creeps in around the edges, starting small and then growing on the periphery until, whether he knows it or not, Bryan is surrounded by it.
This only works if you get a few things right, and the most crucial by far is casting. As Bryan, Abrams has to play the platonic ideal of Ordinary Guy in an Extraordinary Situation, at least at first, but the real trick to getting the character right is what he does next. As the insanity of his night mounts, Bryan seems to go crazy along with the mad world around him, bursting into laughter one minute and weeping the next. There's a certain madcap energy that's required, and it has to come through alongside empathy. Abrams pulls that off, often as the only human character onscreen, and delivers an incredible performance.
Cregger and Shay Hatten's script is also a wonder, a mashup of comedy, horror, and action that's absolutely soaked in the absurdity of Bryan's situation. We've all seen zombie outbreak movies, and we've even seen movies of this kind where the protagonist has no idea what's going on and has to piece it together himself, but Resident Evil feels fresh, by those standards and even the standards of its own larger franchise. Bryan's objective as a character, both materially and emotionally, is always clear, and yet he never gets to travel in a straight line. His journey is a series of misadventures, not just obstacles he must overcome but obstacles he sometimes unwittingly creates. Some viewers might find the comedy a bit too much, particularly when it's mixed with some of the film's most effective scares, but Cregger's goal here is to show us how everything, even our most high-minded notions of the horrific, can unravel under the right circumstances, and that makes the film both unpredictable and relentlessly entertaining.
Any Resident Evil movie is going to have its detractors, whether they're worried that it's not close enough to the games, that it's too close to the games, that it doesn't get iconic characters right, or any number of other complaints. This movie will not please everyone, but for my money, this is must-see horror franchise filmmaking. Cregger's knack for the unpredictable, and for tying it all together until it feels inevitable, melds perfectly with Abrams' tragicomic sensibilities, and unforgettable monsters do the rest. This is a brutal, bombastic blast of a time at the movies.
Resident Evil is now playing in theaters.
