“Here are the main things you need to know about the Resident Evil games,” I explained to my friend Liz over the nonsense of the Digger trailer. “There’s a big outbreak of some kind of mutagenic virus. First you get a pistol, then you get a shotgun. A dog usually attacks you. There are locks and you look for keys. You open a lot of drawers. There’s an evil pharmaceutical company called Umbrella. You start in a house and end in a lab.”
“Got it,” Liz said. “I’ll point at the screen when any of that happens.”
“You heal yourself with herbs,” I added helpfully.
And thus there was a lot of pointing in our screening of Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, a clean re-adaptation of the Capcom video game franchise. While the last cinematic run of Resident Evil movies were extremely loose, extremely Y2K adaptations defined by women backflipping while holding two things and guys getting busted up into little cubes, Cregger’s film is a back-to-basics stab, paring away 30 years of blissfully stupid lore—no boulders are punched, no sunglasses flung, no hands chomped by Lycans—to instead focus on one dirtbag courier making an ill-fated run to Raccoon City on the night of a monster virus outbreak. It goes pretty poorly for him.
The movie is good. It moves. It’s gnarly. It makes you go “Aah!” and “Eugh.” I laughed loudly and often alone in my awful Brooklyn audience. As reviews across the board have hammered home, unlike any previous RE outing, this movie captures the feeling of actually playing the games: “The white-knuckled helplessness of entering a new room and flinching at the way it’s framed to emphasize all the places a monster could jump out,” as David Ehrlich puts it in his review for IndieWire. “The addictively queasy tug-of-war between wanting to explore the next section and wanting to just say ‘nope’ and turn the whole thing off.”
“Addictively” is a funny choice of words. Ehrlich tosses it off casually here, but I want to grab and hold it. I started playing survival horror games a few years before I started drinking, beginning with Resident Evil 4 on the PS2, helping shearling-clad heartthrob Leon S. Kennedy rescue the president’s big-titty daughter from the most nightmarish parasite zombies Spain has to offer. A decade and change later, in the dead of a Chicago January and dead on my feet, I wandered into my first AA meeting. I played Resident Evil 7 later that winter, the series’ own back-to-basics entry, hoping something loud and nasty could cut through the fog of early sobriety.
What I found instead, playing that game and others like it over the years of recovery to come, was that more than any other genre, survival horror games capture the experience, the headspace, the phenomenal reality of active addiction. Survival horror games are defined by scarcity, the panic of lack. You never have quite enough bullets for all the living corpses bearing down on you. If you throw that grenade at a monster now, what happens if you need it for a bigger one later? You always need more, and it’s never enough. The familiar world is estranged, domestic and public spaces now treacherous to move through, filled with people (or things like them) who will drain you of your resources, your wellbeing, your lifelines. In between blowing enemies away, you scrounge and hoard, swinging between elation when you’re newly flush from a cache or windfall, and panic as your stash drains away. Escalation is a treadmill. The empowerment of a new gun—a Colt .45, maybe, if I wanted to be cute—only lingers til your problems start soaking more bullets, growing more tentacles. Maybe a little guy with a big hat shows up. Now you have to fuckingdeal with that, on top of everything else. Christ.
Of course, I kept playing. There’s plenty of pleasure to be had. Survival horror games corner you into crunchy little micro-puzzles. How do you down three zombies with two bullets? How do you sneak a flask through a security pat-down? Play long enough and the Tetris Effect kicks in; the world feels like the game, a series of dark spaces to navigate, predicaments to overcome. You see it in your dreams.
Cregger’s Resident Evil really does feel like the games, which is to say, I watched it through my addict eyes. Our poor doomed organ courier, Bryan, is played by Austin Abrams with tooth-grinding key-bump energy. He is constantly, desperately, reactively trying to outmaneuver the consequences of his actions. He has an unexpectedly pregnant girlfriend at home. He doesn’t want to be there. So he sets out for a high-paying, top-priority run on the snowy mountain roads to Raccoon City Hospital, swerving without snow tires until he accidentally runs a woman down. This is a horror movie, so you know where that’s going.
“Fear…” says the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, “somehow touches about every aspect of our lives. It was an evil and corroding thread; the fabric of our existence was shot through with it. It set in motion trains of circumstances which brought us misfortune we felt we didn’t deserve.” Fear, you have beaten into you in AA, is what drives addicts more than anything. Fear drives Bryan, who drives this movie. Despite being a 2020s horror-comedy, it’s blessedly free of tidy setups and payoffs, instead leaning into the snowballing messiness of escalation and improvisation. A sheriff pulls Bryan over for swerving with a mangled woman in his passenger seat and he has to talk his way out of it while being breathalyzed. He fires wildly at a zombie and punctures his engine block. He lets Paul Walter Hauser be pulled into a ball of living corpses, and now the corpse ball’s bigger. Each unmanageable situation worsens the next—a train derailment of circumstances. Any security he wrests from his situation is gone in the next moment, usually because of his wresting strategy. He gets a pistol, then a shotgun, but it’s never quite enough. Maybe if he had a grenade launcher.
Through it all, Bryan complains, inarticulately and futilely, about how much it all sucks, how unfair it all is. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the area. None of this is his fault, which is sort of true, except for all the parts that are his fault. “I didn’t just shoot a little girl in the face,” he tells himself after shooting a little girl in her rapidly mutating face. Why would you stop to look right at anything you’ve done when the world is terrifying and you can just keep moving?
Bryan’s world operates on addict logic, too. Everyone he encounters either tries to use him or he uses them: the hapless Umbrella Corp stooge, who demands he retrieve their car keys from a very evil tunnel; the cop he guilts into giving his obviously zombified passenger a ride; the shockingly sympathetic acid-puking zombie he aims at his pursuers. “Why is he still in here?” a scientist demands to know later in the movie, never mind that Bryan waded through meat hell to deliver his package. Meat hell is cozy homes, RVs, city streets, hospital hallways, familiar spaces all made strange, scary, cruel, to be shuffled through cautiously, head on a swivel, gun up, phone flashlight on. There are never enough bullets.
The Easter eggs for the Real Gamers hit strangely through addict eyes. Escaping a mutant dog through a hayloft (“Dog,” I said to Liz), Bryan ignores the obviously placed health spray canisters just to his left, while I fixate on them with the same distracting intensity as I would a Manhattan abandoned half-full. He’s really not gonna grab those? My gut muscles clench. They give you full health and he’s just wasting them. This is the mindset of the true horror gamer.
Is it strange for a Resident Evil movie to stir up Proustian recollections? No. It’s actually not weird to watch Bryan pull open one drawer after another, in a stranger’s bedroom looking for shotgun shells, and be reminded of all the things I’d drunkenly stolen at house parties, the $2 bill I slipped out of a wallet, vaguely justified by “Fuck these people.” The next morning, I’d learn it was the only thing Sam had to remember his beloved grandfather by and he was devastated to lose it. It’s normal to watch Bryan, alone and infected in a parking garage, record a sobbing confession into his phone, and flash back to sitting day-drunk, crying and listening to Hop Along in the third-floor janitor’s closet of a Chelsea hotel I’d wandered into just to see if I could, even though in the theater I’m the only one laughing because he’s doing environmental storytelling; he’s making a fucking audio log. “I’m not good at guns,” Bryan whines, having only shot them in video games, and I’m in snowy Wisconsin, 10 months into AA and firing guns for the first time on a sober men’s gun trip, quieting intrusive thoughts to blast clay pigeons with unsettling accuracy thanks to video games. As we watch Bryan watch two zombies he killed sprout fleshy tendrils and fuse into a single limb-rich entity, who else is feeling the same slow creeping panic as learning their ex who didn’t want to hear amends and their ex-close friend who’d asked for no contact were starting a podcast together? Horror comes from somewhere real. For me, it’s me.
For Zach Cregger, it might be Zach Cregger. The director and co-writer is not only vocal about his alcoholism and 10-plus years of sobriety—if you want to hear him field questions about AA while playing Dark Souls, you can—but about how it informs his filmmaking. His last movie, Weapons, is riddled with metaphorical and literal addiction: Julia Garner’s alcoholic schoolteacher, Alden Ehrenreich’s tenuous sobriety, the nightmare of being a parentified child keeping an awful secret in your ever-degenerating house. Watching your loved one suddenly turn unreachable and monstrous. And, of course, Abrams as a beat-up muppet of a junkie, bopping into houses to find stuff to sell, grinding away on endless side quests until he breaks into a house he shouldn’t have. Cregger’s movies are charged with the alcoholic’s perpetual state of restless irritable discontentment, a sense of terrible wrongness always emanating from just behind the frame. His characters are fuckups. There’s evil, too, but really, you’re watching his characters deliver themselves to it, one tragic mistake at a time.
Abrams’ stomped-on charm buoys Weapons, but he is Resident Evil’s anchor. He has the same rat-man DNA everyone was writing trend pieces about a few years ago. His performance strings you along as much as horror-movie pacing does: He’s babygirl one moment, infuriating the next. The movie, like the games, is lonely. His few companions never last long; most of the dialogue is Abrams muttering to himself. In the games, you mostly play as badasses: tactical operatives, flinty women, Leon S. Kennedy. Even your regular-guy player characters end up firing off rocket launchers and/or having psychic mold powers.
For as much as Resident Evil puts you in the same headspace as the games do, this is their big divergence. You can only watch as Bryan whiffs shots and fumbles shotgun shells and lies. As a horror-movie protagonist, he’s a heel, his incompetence and cowardice there for the audience to rail against. Why the fuck would you do that? I wouldn’t have done that. There’s a weird splitting of (dis)identification here, with the audience bounced back and forth like a paddleball. When Abrams and the movie bring you close to Bryan, you are the addict, disempowered and scrabbling. It’s the nightmare of driving the car from the backseat, the infuriatingly sluggish tank controls of the original games. When you’re pushed away from him, you’re the addict’s friend or family, watching them fuck up again, predictably, the way they always do, the way you never would, the way they could avoid if they just exerted some self-control, just got their shit together.
“An alcoholic in his cups is an unlovely creature,” writes AA cofounder Bill W. in the opening chapter of the Big Book. “Our struggles with them are variously strenuous, comic, and tragic.” When a little girl zombie bites and infects Bryan at the movie’s first-act break, the tragedy starts creeping in. The seal between person and monster is punctured. Should’ve grabbed that health spray, buddy. AA famously first popularized the perspective that alcoholism is a disease—a “progressive disease,” specifically—as a way of cultivating empathy for the alcoholic, as much from themselves as from the public. When we’re in active addiction, we’re “sick and suffering.” We’re charged in our stepwork to look at anyone who’s hurt us through the same lens: “Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves, ‘This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him?’”
The more Bryan’s infection spreads, the more his desperation mounts, and the less it separates him from the zombies hurling themselves off roofs to pulp on the pavement. To the extent Abrams has a costar, it might as well be the ever-expanding, ever-tumbling ball of corpses that chases him through almost the entire movie, pulling in his victims as it goes, his own personal Nemesis. It’s almost too on the nose, this amalgamation of his past pursuing him implacably, heedless of his half-hearted attempt to make amends at the 11th hour. “Sorry I hit you with my car,” he croaks from a crumbling skybridge. What if a fourth-step inventory could kill you? But more than murder, the virus seems to want to meld. As it progresses, it manifests as sticky tendrils that assimilate living and dead alike. They’re not man and monster, really, just one creature of need pursuing another, separated only by time and space.
As the movie climaxes in a sterile white biotech lab (“Lab,” I said to Liz), Bryan commits the foundational sin of zombie movies: He hides his bite. “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” people in AA are fond of telling you, and Bryan is extremely sick. As he mutates into an unlovely creature, we shift perspective to the scientists, watching his monstrousness from the outside as he massacres them one at a time, unmoved by their UCB Comedy pedigrees, desperate for the glowing green syringe they have that will cure him. A huge toothy mouth opens in his chest, a hunger without end. Addiction is a series of red lines you watch yourself cross one at a time, a series of doors with something awful behind them you nonetheless know you’ll open, until you’re unrecognizable to yourself, until you realize you’re the one who’s been stashing the alcohol you’re scrounging for like a Resident Evil character, until you face the awful reality that you’re the designer of your own survival horror game.
I won’t say if Bryan cures himself or not, but I’ll say that the score swells with emotion and wonder as the camera sweeps over a changed man in a changed world. A man who’s found connection and wholeness. He’s done running. He has not ceased fighting everything and everyone, as the Big Book promises, but he will soon enough. The nightmare and the dream coexist. Survival can be horror, too.
