I am of the firm belief that the subgenre of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day movies belongs in the Top 3 genres ever devised in the history of cinema, because there is something endlessly entertaining about watching an ordinary person discover that a manageable inconvenience has metastasised into a full-scale indictment of their existence. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is his After Hours, except Martin Scorsese’s nocturnal tribulations in Soho have been relocated to Raccoon City, where the night keeps taking increasingly grotesque T-virus liberties with the human form.
Cregger could have found no better Paul Hackett for this ordeal than Austin Abrams, whose Bryan seems forever one minor affront to his peace away from needing to lie down. He is a medical courier who takes an ill-advised final delivery through a snowstorm for some extra money, hits a woman with his car, discovers that she may be a zombie, gets stopped by a policeman, loses his car, and then spends the remaining 97-minute nightmare shooting at things with comical incompetence.
Resident Evil (English)
Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis, Zach Cherry
Runtime: 97 minutes
Storyline: A medical courier finds himself in a desperate fight for survival against bloodthirsty, mutated creatures
Bryan has the unfortunate occupational fatalism of a desperate gig worker, coupled with the survival instincts of an NPC whose principal contribution to the plot is usually a sad, little note explaining how he died. Cregger knows just how funny it is to perpetually keep him in that state, so every time Bryan acquires some semblance of control, the film periodically removes it again, usually by making him shoot at yet another comically indestructible padlock or whatever fresh biological nonsense Cregger has cooked up around the corner.
Abrams plays every stage of that humiliation with aplomb. It is genuinely difficult to think of another recent performance so completely calibrated to the specific idiocy of survival-horror. Most of his dialogue sounds like live commentary on his own impending death, with Bryan muttering and groaning to himself in consistent disbelief, making little verbal negotiations with the environment, screeching like a pterodactyl at every turn and attaching a charming succession of “f**k”s to approximately every available noun, verb and conjunction since the English lexicon doesn’t quite contain the adequate vocabulary for what is happening to him.
A still from ‘Resident Evil’
| Photo Credit:
Columbia Pictures
The film had some serious franchise baggage to shake off. The six Milla Jovovich movies built their own action mythology around Capcom’s games for years, while Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City tried to steer the series back towards the first two titles. Cregger simply leaves most of that luggage behind. Leon, Ada, Claire and Wesker are nowhere to be found, and Bryan has absolutely no need to understand Umbrella’s sprawling corporate pathology before he can get through the next door. Some fans understandably bristled at that choice.
The funny thing is that Cregger seems to understand the Resident Evilgames at the basest level of their most perversely specific habits. The typewriters and green herbs are obvious nods, but the gun and its ammunition being stranded in entirely different parts of the building is almost comically faithful to the games, where possessing a weapon and possessing the means to use it can feel like two unrelated achievements. Bryan keeps checking what he has, what he needs and what he can afford to waste, and Cregger understands that this inventory anxiety is part of the pleasure. Every bullet matters because there may be nothing behind the next door except something that might require six of them. There is a specificity to these little details that makes the idea of Cregger as some opportunistic Resident Evil larper just absurd.
We already knew Cregger had a particular knack for making horror funny without draining it of its unpleasantness. Barbarian frightened me more, while Weapons made me laugh harder, so the real achievement is the confluence of those two instincts while simultaneously rebuilding the very sensory experience of playing Resident Evil from scratch. The film makes you think about where you are, where you have been and what you can plausibly reach before something reaches you. Bryan is constantly forced to improvise around the physical world, and Cregger gives those little acts of problem-solving a ridiculous amount of tension because RE characters usually attempt them while terrified, injured, short on ammunition or being actively pursued by something menacing. That is the Resident Evil experience, and Cregger somehow gets there without borrowing its story.
Cregger draws on John Carpenter and Sam Raimi for his exaggerated creature designs, and this is where his appetite for practical horror becomes especially satisfying. He stages a full mutilated extravaganza including the alien-dog from The Thing; a skyborne parade of exploding corpses; a Baron Harkonnen lookalike from Dune whose stomach erupts into rats; and, funniest of all, the same woman Bryan first runs his car into, who pursues him through the night while repeatedly evolving into a Rat King-like grotesque.
A still from ‘Resident Evil’
| Photo Credit:
Columbia Pictures
Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography gives the carnage a strangely sumptuous frame that is remarkably easy on the eyes, shifting between a gorgeous play of light and shadow, lurid red hues, and anxiety-inducing POV shots that turn Bryan’s field of vision into another mechanism of suspense.
A minor gripe is that the film’s lean runtime leaves its supporting players underfed and largely unnecessary. Once Bryan reaches Raccoon City, Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis have to shoulder the job of explaining the outbreak and the package he had been carrying; the story suddenly has to pause its one-man nightmare to fill in some of the larger franchise connections. The information is necessary, though the mythology never quite gathers enough weight to justify its inclusion.
That said, Cregger has genuinely pulled a defining feat here. When a close friend of mine, and a resident Resident Evil superfan, first convinced me to give the games a shot (RE 7: Biohazard to be specific), I spent much of my initiation nervously screaming, crying, throwing up and progressively losing whatever remained of my dignity at the mere suggestion that something might be waiting around the corner. My incompetence was apparently the evening’s entertainment for my veteran friend, who found my terror considerably funnier than I did, and it seems Cregger understands that pleasure perfectly. I think that makes Resident Evil one of the rare films to genuinely capture the experience of playing a game without asking you to pick up a controller. It’s an extraordinarily difficult sensation to reproduce in cinema, and Cregger gets pretty damn close.
Resident Evil is currently running in theatres
