Only a few minutes into Resident Evil, you can see why Zach Cregger would be so keen to make this film. It might seem like an unlikely detour for the burgeoning horror auteur behind Barbarian and last year’s Oscar-winning Weapons, but it becomes clear early on that Cregger is having a blast here. Free of any aspirations of “elevated horror” and mostly jettisoning the video game lore, Cregger has crafted a grubby, irreverent and satisfying survival horror ode to Raimi and Carpenter.
In doing so, he also deftly captures what makes playing a game like Resident Evil so thrilling, smartly working the mechanics of a game into the narrative. The protagonist is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a hapless medical courier who is the perfect stand-in for a novice gamer. Far from the hyper-proficient badass played by Milla Jovovich in the previous entries in the franchise, Bryan is an average Joe fumbling his way through a series of increasingly outlandish situations as an accident in a biotech lab turns the world to shit during a delivery gig from hell.
His mission is to deliver a mysterious cooler to the hospital in Raccoon City, but along the way he is confronted by a stream of zombified mutants, tentacle-bound creatures, bloated corpses filled with rats, acid-vomiting monsters and giant bulbous blood sacs ready to pop. Bryan zips from one set-piece to another in a structure that emulates the levels of a video game, with the threats becoming increasingly more grotesque and harder to kill. But as the enemies become more extreme, so does Bryan’s arsenal, advancing from a simple pistol to an assault rifle. In true video game fashion, he has to keep finding ammo and keep track of how much he has left – no mean feat for someone as ill-equipped as Bryan.
It might frustrate veteran gamers to see Bryan struggle to ‘solve’ every level, opting to waste ammo shooting padlocks or total a car trying to drive through steel gates, rather than simply hunting his surroundings for a key. But it’s easier to think when you’re behind a controller and have infinite lives – Bryan is only working with one and he’s in the thick of it. His way of coping is a panicked stream of consciousness as he bumbles his way through every scenario with barely any time to comprehend the things he’s doing. Abrams, who was so enjoyable in Weapons, is fantastic in this role, blending exasperated quips with slapstick physical humour. He spends the majority of the film either alone or opposite grotesque creatures, tasked with carrying its human element with only the thinnest of backstories to work with. He proves an excellent everyman.
In charting Bryan’s nightmarish journey, Cregger fills the world with a mix of CGI and practical gore, imbuing the film with a satisfyingly squelchy feel. There’s a real inventiveness and wit in the design of the slimy, bloody and all round gnarly creatures on display with Cregger finding a smart balance between gruesome body horror, smart jump scares and gallows humour. In that sense, the film plays like Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 with smatterings of Carpenter’s The Thing and Escape from New York, all sharply lensed by veteran cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, operating in full Dark City mode. What is perhaps most impressive is how quickly the film moves; at only 87 minutes, the film is lean and mean, diving straight into its story and hurtling through its nightmarish scenes at breakneck pace, barely slowing down for even a moment.
For all the liberties Cregger takes with the source material, his take on Resident Evil captures something fundamental about the games: survival is much more satisfying when it feels improbable. Bryan never becomes an invincible action hero, he just gets a little better at navigating the nightmare he has stumbled into. Cregger has essentially made a cinematic playthrough with a player who has no idea what he’s doing, no walkthrough to consult and, crucially, no option to restart. Though not as weighty or ambitious as Weapons, it’s enormously entertaining to watch Cregger cut loose with a bloody, breathless spectacle.
